What Is the Most Precious Gift We Can Give Another Person?

In a recent article, Renée Onque writes about the most important thing she learnt from the new book by Oprah Winfrey and the Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks: the most precious gift we can give another person.

“I really learned, from all those years of interviewing people, that one of the greatest gifts you can give to anybody is your FULL ATTENTION.”

It brought me back to when I read Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Bông Hồng Cài Áo (A Rose for Your Pocket), the part about people who live with their mother all their lives and yet have never truly been beside her…

We don’t need more time, we need more focus.

An excerpt from Bông Hồng Cài Áo

“Mother is a spring of water, an endless treasure, and yet there are times when we do not know it, and let it go to waste for nothing. Mother is the greatest gift life gives to us, to those of us who have had a mother and still have one. Do not wait until she has died to say: “Heavens, I lived beside my mother for decades and there was never once a time when I looked at her face properly!” Always only a glance in passing. A few short words exchanged. Asking for money for sweets. Demanding everything. Holding her while we sleep to keep warm. Sulking. Taking offence. Making so much trouble that she has to worry, to wear thin, to stay up late and rise early for her child. To die early, also for her child. Leaving her a whole life of the kitchen, of mending and sewing, of washing and tidying. And leaving ourselves a whole life of being busy, going up and down and in and out after profit and name. Mother has no time to look at her child properly. And the child has no time to look at their mother properly. So that when she is gone we have the feeling: “It is truly as if I had never once been aware that I had a mother!”

“This afternoon when you come home from school, or home from work at the office, go into your mother’s room with a smile that is very quiet and very steady. Sit down beside her. Make her put down her needle and thread, and say nothing at all. Then look at her for a long time, look closely, so as to see her and to know that she is still alive and is sitting beside you. Take her hand, and ask her one short question to catch her attention. Ask: “Mother, do you know?” She will be a little surprised and will ask you, asking and laughing at once, “Know what?” Still looking into her eyes, still holding that quiet, steady smile, you will say: “Do you know that I love you?” The question will not need an answer. Even a grown person of thirty or forty may ask such a question, because that person is their mother’s child. You and your mother will be happy, and will live in a love that does not die. You and your mother will both become undying, and tomorrow, when she is gone, you will not have to regret, or ache.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/13/my-number-one-takeaway-from-oprahs-new-happiness-book.html