On Giving What We Don't Have to Give
Anxiety, Solitude, and the Meaning of Giving on my Daughter's Third Birthday
This past week, my family and I moved. The transition left me with very little time in front of a screen. As a result, I will not be posting an article on Heidegger’s “Memorial Address” this week.
Instead, I am sharing a piece I recently wrote for my daughter’s third birthday.
As I have mentioned before, I am experimenting with new formats on Philosophy Walkthroughs. This piece is an example of a personal walkthrough, where I show how I use philosophy to make sense of my own life.
In this piece, I use my background in phenomenological philosophy to make sense of the anxiety I felt one morning after hearing what my daughter wanted for her present, and how these reflections helped me articulate what it means to give a gift in our consumerist culture.
As soon as she said what she wanted, I knew we wouldn’t find one exactly like it.
My daughter’s third birthday is coming soon. Last week, in the kitchen, I asked her what she wanted. She was distracted and didn’t answer. Her mother was there and gently nudged her: Tell Daddy what you told me. Still nothing. About the bike.
That got her attention. I want the bike with the flowers.
Her mom turned to me. She must’ve seen it somewhere. She’s being super specific. She wants one with flowers you can put on and take off.
I looked at my daughter again, knowing we probably wouldn’t find exactly what she had seen, and felt a wave of anxiety wash over me.
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That afternoon, I was driving with my daughter, when I asked her where she’d seen the bike with the flowers.
By the cherry blossoms, she said from her car seat.
And where were the cherry blossoms?
By the mud.
She went on to explain: the cherry blossoms were on the tree, the mud was under it, and he stepped into it.
He? Who’s he? The little girl with the bike?
After pausing for a moment, she said, Daddy, can I have a Tic Tac?
I passed her the strawberry kind, and we drove in silence down streets lined with blossoming cherry trees.
I remembered my anxiety that morning and wondered why I had felt it.
We live in a culture that commodifies parents’ best wishes for their children. Not only about how they fare in life but also about everything we want to give them. There is a pressure to prove our worth by inflating the value of each gift, by trying to give them everything they want.
Of course, her mother and I are not immune to this. We live in a consumerist culture that has shaped us this way too. On some level, perhaps part of me was anxious about falling short of this fantasy.
But even in the kitchen that morning, I knew it wasn’t about finding the perfect gift. That even if we didn’t find the one she was thinking of, we would find a bike she would love.
As we drove beneath the cherry blossom trees, these reflections reminded me of what I had learned about anxiety in my field of philosophy.
In phenomenology, the prevailing view is that, unlike fear, anxiety has no object.
When we are afraid, we fear something specific: such as an intruder in the house, an angry wasp attacking us, or a serious virus going around.
Anxiety, by contrast, is not really about external things. It is less about what is happening ‘out there,’ and more about our capacity to respond to what is happening.
In philosophical terms, it is about the burden of our freedom.
In democratic societies, most people think of freedom as a good thing. And it is, especially in political, economic, and cultural life. But philosophically, freedom can also be a burden because it carries the possibility of failure. Not just any failure, like failing a test or not finding the best gift. But failure of a far more devastating kind: the failure to live up to who we are capable of becoming.
Anxiety is the alarm or flare that alerts us to our responsibility to become who we truly are.
It was beautiful out, the day my daughter and I were driving in the van, on our way to enjoy the weather.
By the time she finished her Tic Tac and began pointing out the field where she once played soccer, I knew my anxiety that morning was not really about finding the exact bike she wanted or even any bicycle she might like.
It was more about me than about the gift itself.
It was calling me to find the true meaning of giving.
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I was seven or eight when I tore off the wrapping paper and realized it wasn’t what I had asked for.
I asked my parents for a video game system, the same kind my best friends had: Nintendo. But somehow, my description of NES as a video game system became computer game in their minds. And so, that morning, I found myself staring down at an Apple II series.
It didn’t even come with a joystick.
I could have told them it wasn’t what I wanted. But they had been separated for years by then, and I had grown tired of being torn between them. This was a gift they had managed to give together. And I didn’t want to undo that.
So I said nothing.
My disappointment that day ran deeper than not getting what I wanted. Even my own parents did not know me well enough to understand what I asked for. It was the beginning of a deeper realization: that I was, in some essential way, alone.
What I was beginning to discover that day was my existential solitude: the aloneness we can feel even in the company of those who love us.
I distinctly remember the pain I felt when I recognized this. What hurt most was not just being misunderstood, but realizing that the misunderstanding itself might never be noticed. The failure to be seen might pass forever unseen by anyone but me.
I never did tell my parents it was the wrong gift.
In the following years, I came to see that it is one thing to be misunderstood and to have the chance to correct the misunderstanding. But there is also, in fact, an unbridgeable gap between who we are and the rest of the world. An uncrossable distance between how deeply we live our existence and how superficially it is seen, heard, and reflected back to us.
True understanding is rare, even in the closest relationships.
Many of us spend much of our lives settling into the shallow estimations the world imposes upon us. We grow accustomed to living unseen, unheard, and unfelt, because we do not know how to show, voice, or put forth who we truly are. And even if we did, the world often lacks the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and the depths to feel with.
So we take the path of least resistance, the one our culture has prepared for us. We consume to show who we are. And then often find ourselves defined by what we possess and achieve.
When really, we should be using what we have to express what cannot be possessed and cannot be given.
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By the time my daughter and I got to a playground that afternoon, I knew my anxiety earlier that morning wasn’t about finding her the exact bike she wanted.
It was more about my capacity to fail to give her something. But not because I might fail to find a bike she would enjoy. No matter what I give her, no gift can bridge the distance between who she is and how the world will meet her.
Nothing can.
The language of gift-giving in our culture fails to grasp this entirely. It misconstrues the gap, even erases it. A gift is supposed to fulfill a want and eliminate the lack it implies.
Yet it is precisely when a gift is given and received with the recognition that it cannot fill this void that the gift most truly expresses the meaning of giving.
Of course, as a parent, much of me wants her to have what she wants. I want to make her happy. But I would never want her to be defined by what she has. Because then her possessions would possess her. Through all the gifts, all the accumulation and possession, I want her never to lose the thread that leads back to who she truly is.
I want the things that gather around her life never to define her, unless they express their inability to do so.
What I was anxious about was my own capacity to fail in expressing this gap to my daughter. To fail to begin showing her now, and to remember to continue showing her over the years, that I see this gap, that I know she inhabits it, and that she can learn to stand in a poetic distance between herself and the things she wants and owns. To use them to give voice, visibility, and form to that gap.
For her third birthday, and for every birthday to come, I want her to have more than I did as a child.
But not because I give her everything she wants. I want to give her what I can, while learning how to show her what I can never give her. And in this, help her know something I did not know as a child.
How to hold that distance between herself and the rest of the world as a way to give voice to who she really is.