March 4

When someone gives you something unexpectedly, the first thing you say might be: “You really didn’t have to.” It’s a polite thing to say, but it also betrays a slight unease. A gift fits into no reckoning. You didn’t earn it, and you owe no particular return for it.

Much in your life is like that, even though no one ever handed it to you: the language you think in, someone who believed early on that you could do something, a body that mostly goes along. Things like these you easily credit to yourself, as if you had earned them. Or you half apologise for them, because others don’t have them.

Giving thanks would be a third possibility. You would neither book what you received as an achievement nor hide it as a head start. Gratitude, though, has its limit too. You can expect it of yourself. You shouldn’t demand it of someone to whom little has been given. There it easily turns into a request not to complain.

With yourself, you can try it. With the next gift, you could simply leave out that first line.