I received a gift several weeks ago. It came wrapped in a telephone conversation, tied with a disclaimer. "I'm not asking you this question," my friend said, "It's just that this is the question I'm dealing with." Like most gifts from one guy to another, it wasn't frilly or fancy. It looked plain and a little rough and I didn't want to deal with it much so I shoved it off to the side of my mind.
I let the gift sit for a long time, thinking it wasn't for me. Even at the time, I realized it was a beautiful, precious thing in spite of its packaging, but I thought it belonged to my friend, and not to me. So I let it sit.
The last few days, however, I keep tripping over it. So last night I decided, finally, to unwrap it, and I realized that the tag had my name on it the whole time. Funny how you can miss things like that. Some gifts just won't leave you alone. So I unwrapped it last night when I was home by myself for the evening, looked at it from a few different angles, poked and prodded and played with the switches and levers. I haven't quite figured out how the gift works yet, but I'm having fun playing with it.
After a half hour or so last night I put it away again. It's mine, of course, and I'll pull it out again. But it is the kind of gift you can play with for a while and then put away and it always comes out fresh. I suspect that the more I use it, the better I'll like it.
What's the gift? I hesitate to tell you because you may not like it. But for some of you, the gift will sit at the edges of your mind until one day, you'll unwrap it and start to play with it. Get in touch and we can have some grand conversations!
As I said earlier, the gift is a question, a question my friend was dealing with, a question he dropped on my desk almost by accident, though I'm not much of a believer in accidents. Here it is:
"What would the next ten years look like if you lived them intentionally?"
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