The Value of Seeing Things Clearly - Seeing the Value of Things Clearly

I gave something away recently, and the recipient’s reaction was very different than I expected.  I am a very practical person, so I like to see resources be utilized.  I am very conscious of needs that I see, and finding creative ways to meet them.  I have recently come into possession of a lot of items I don't really have much use for, and have been trying to find ways to connect them with people who need them.  A variety of them have no obvious immediate practical use, and I will compare the items in question to appliances that have had their power cords cut off.  My initial reaction was to assume they needed to be donated somewhere or trashed, even though they had previous been valuable.

But it eventually occurred to me that if I replaced the “power cords,” they could potentially be useful to someone who actually needs something like that.  But it isn't worth the time and expense of repairing them unless someone actually wants to use them.  I realized that someone I know has needed one of these things for a long time, and I had even offered to buy one for them in the past, but it had never happened.  So my practical side led me to make the offer, even though the item in question was fairly old and used.  If they were interested in using it, I intended to replace the power cord for them, so that it would actually be fully functional again.

Instead, the person I offered it to was more interested in the aesthetic and sentimental value of the object in question, and had no real interest in actually making it functional, even though it is something they actually needed.  My initial reaction was, “whatever makes you happy.”  A bit later, the practical side of me was confident that I should make sure to fix it anyway, since it was "needed," regardless of what they wanted.  But I realized that what had happened was that my gift had been stripped of all practical use, which bothered me.  But that the recipient still valued it, just for other reasons, so I should too.  This helped me recognize the other aspects of the value in what I had given away, which had been less immediately apparent to me.  I almost value it more, now that I have seen all practical value stripped away, than I did when I saw it as a solution to an existing problem.  But I still intend to find a solution to that problem, even if by totally different means, because that's just who I am.