After spending two weeks talking with students who find themselves caught up in the expectations game of college admissions, as well as with their teachers who find themselves feeling the pressure of helping those students win (or get out from under the playing of that game), and after telling the bosses of those teachers that designing for joy, play, and creativity instead of rigor might relieve everyone on campus, I returned to Amsterdam with a few gifts to give.
Offering a small bag of beans from Burundi (purchased at Seam coffee in Johannesburg) to Bruno (of Bruno’s coffee, where I purchase at least one cup a week), reminds me how awkward giving can be.
First Bruno and I catch up. I have e been to Joburg, he has been away in Panama with his partner. The whole time there, he tells me, they only travel by local transport and only go where the day takes them. Despite it being obvious they are from “out of town” or, as Bruno suggests, “from another planet” they meet, in his words, “only beautiful people.”
I make sure to wait until after this short back and forth is over and after I have paid (lest he comp me the outrageously delicious coffee he makes me) before giving him his beans. Bruno nevertheless looks as though my gift is a burden. “More beans below my standards?” Something like this looks to cross him mind. Maybe I have just given wax to the candle maker, offered honey to a beekeepeer?
Maybe Bruno just does not really know how to say thank you to me in a way that meets whatever I am after, which is nothing more than letting him know I appreciate the art with which he practices his craft and his reliable place in my life.
I do not exactly clarify any of this and am really I am just one of many customers who enjoys what Bruno does.
Nor is he without his eccentricities, the qualities of brusqueness and determination that make him a madman of coffee, his small shop so wonderfully different from anything like Starbucks also making him a little standoffish.
Nothing we discuss is small talk and yet nothing more than that either. If we were stuck on a desert island together I do not know if we would find no end of things to discuss or discover that we have nothing at all in common.
But what does this matter? The lameness of how I offer up my gift? The chunkiness of how he receives it?
Giving is rarely smooth. This is one reason it is often better done anonymously. since that undoes any transactionalism. It is also why people fear it more than they should.
But it is nice to let people know you love them, to offfer them something you think they will enjoy, and to learn of them in the process.
And even mediocre, awkward giving is better than being “good” and measuring up.
Because the habit of giving, hard as it can be to get into with a life to live and one’s own concerns to tend to, helps you escape all that measuring, get beyond those concerns, lets you glimpse the beauty of the people on this planet.