Skip to main content

Gifts

Image
By
This is a chapter from my third book called Love letters

I was hoping the word gift would have an interesting etymology so that would make a good start to this chapter. The origin of the word gift turns out to be pretty ordinary to me. The word "gift" descends from the Old Norse word "gipt". Gipt means both "gift" and "good luck". There were many times I was lucky and won gifts. When I was in my teens I won a game boy from the Flavorite contest. There was a pallet man as we called him who passed through the village.

At a team building exercise at my first job out of university I was the closest to guess the amount of beans in a bag and won some spending money. At another job I won a stack of Movietowne tickets for scoring the highest in the orientation game. For a time, many weekends I would go watch a movie in the cinema. As a child I looked forward to receiving the gift of money on Eid day. One hadith narrates, "Give each other gifts and you will love each other." Hadiths are traditions of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

I love receiving gifts but I also love giving gifts. I once gifted my uncle a nice Casio watch that he cherished and used until the band was worn and needed to be replaced. My mom often talks about the beautiful chain and earring set I once gifted her. Charity is also a form of gift giving. I remember the great floods of twenty eighteen when the country came together to help those of us who were affected by the flooding.

It is important to me to have an attitude of gratitude. I am thankful for the gift of life. Every day that I wake up and I am able, I thank God. I am also thankful for the gifts of talent that I was born with. Picasso once said, "The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away." I am learning that one of my gifts is my literary ability and gift of storytelling. For those of you reading this book I would like to suggest that this book would make a great gift to the people special in your life. This is a story of someone sharing their loves with the world and this book will be an encouragement for others to write their own love letters.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How do we fix this world?

By
It is 4:39 pm and I have decided to write. It is a peaceful and quiet day. I am thinking about God, and how this life is a test. There is so much happening in this world that could make us sad. But we do not have to remain in that sadness when we put our trust in God. God wants good for us. God wants us to experience peace, and even happiness, despite what surrounds us. How do we fix this world? My friend Chatty suggests that maybe a better question is: What kind of person do I choose to be in this world? Because when enough people answer that question well, that is how real change begins. I want to be the kind of person that God is pleased with. Someone guided by God, not by ego. Someone who chooses patience over anger, humility over pride, and sincerity over appearances. I am doing reasonably well, but I am not perfect. And maybe perfection is not the goal. Growth is. Awareness is. Returning to what is right, again and again, is. I want to grow, and I will keep adjusting myself when ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hobby project - Store and view exchange rates

By
The next step in my project was to test out being able store and display the rates in a database. I decided to use nodejs and supabase for this. Everything worked beautifully. Only hickup was the following error due to my package.json not being correct. SyntaxError: Cannot use import statement outside a module Added this to package.json   "type": "module" This works beautifully. Right now I am just testing fragments of what could be part of a bigger system to see what is possible and what works and how easy to code on a mobile. There is no fully functioning integrated end to end system just yet. This is also what I tested. A serverless append-only database using GitHub + Actions + Pages. That’s basically a lightweight backend system. This was the ChatGPT prompt I used. Guide me through each step. This is what I want. A manually run github actions that adds to docs/data.json with the current date and time. docs/index.html displays all the entries in data.json. Make s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mundane

By
It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...
Post a Comment
Read more