From Where I Sit: The Smallest, Most Impactful Gifts

The smallest gifts aren't things. They're moments — and the people who love you enough to stop and share them.

A few days ago I got two texts.

Cathy and I have built a fast friendship — the kind where you feel like you've always known each other, and are a little surprised you haven't. She's in Miami, where her daughters are building their lives — young women in their twenties, planting roots in a new city. Cathy is Jewish; her husband is not. But they had a seder, and she sent me a note her mother had written to her in 2014 — a written memory of a seder Cathy had hosted, and how beautiful it was. The reason this stopped me: her mother has Alzheimer's now. She's nonverbal. She doesn't remember much of anything anymore. That note is a message in a bottle from a woman who no longer exists in the same way. And Cathy wanted to share it with me. I felt the weight of that — and the gift of being trusted with it. Some connections don't need decades to go deep.

The second text was from Sherri. Sherri and I have been friends for a long time — the kind of friendship that has its own history, its own shorthand. Her daughter Dana and my middle daughter were friends from grade school, which means Sherri and I were in the bleachers together, in the carpool line together, in the living room together. We have roots. Dana is 37 now, a mother herself with two daughters of her own, living her life in Spain. And Sherri was traveling to see her — in Marrakech, of all the beautiful places — when she sent me the text.

She wanted to show me pictures of where they were staying. But she also wanted to tell me something Dana still carries. Two things, specifically, that she'd learned from me somewhere in those years when she was young and I was just Sherri's friend, just another grown-up in the room.

No one ever knows what you didn't choose.

Drop a hip and put the other foot forward — in ALL pictures.

I laughed. And then I got quiet.

Here's the thing about that first one. I've said it my whole life. It's one of those phrases that lives in me — something I reach for when a decision feels too heavy, when someone is second-guessing a choice, when the weight of what if starts crowding out the present moment. I don't remember saying it specifically to Dana. But I'm sure I did. Because I say it to everyone. It's just part of how I see the world.

What I didn't know — what I couldn't have known — is that it showed up for her on her wedding day. That beautiful, overwhelming, once-in-a-lifetime day when everything feels enormous and every decision feels permanent. She was nervous. And she remembered. No one ever knows what you didn't choose. And it calmed her.

Something I've said a thousand times, to a girl who was just her mother's daughter, reached into one of the most important moments of her life and gave her peace.

I have no memory of the specific moment I said it to her. But it traveled — through years, across an ocean, into a wedding day — and it was still alive in her. Alive enough that a 37-year-old mother in Spain mentioned it to her own mother, who sent it back to me from Marrakech on that Saturday morning, with two red hearts at the end.

This is what I keep coming back to: we are constantly giving gifts we don't know we're giving. A phrase that becomes someone's anchor. A note written in 2014 that becomes a lifeline ten years later. A posture tip that shows up in every photo a woman takes for the rest of her life. We hand these things off without ceremony, without intention, sometimes without even realizing we've said anything at all — and they keep going. They travel farther than we do.

And then — if we're lucky — they come back.

That's the part nobody tells you. That generosity isn't just about what you give. It's about what gets carried. What gets shared. What someone decides is worth passing along because it steadied them — even on their wedding day — and they want you to know.

Cathy didn't have to send me that note. Sherri didn't have to tell me what Dana remembered. But they did. And in doing so, they gave me something I didn't know I needed — proof that the small things matter. That the phrase you've said a thousand times, the offhand tip, the way you see the world — it lands somewhere. It lives in someone.

I am proud of my friendships with both of these women. Cathy and I are still writing our story. Sherri and I have been writing ours for decades, and it keeps getting better. But what moves me most isn't just that they thought of me. It's that they stopped. In the middle of their lives, in the middle of their travels, in the middle of someone else's beautiful moment — they paused and felt pulled to share it. That choice — to share a meaningful moment rather than just hold it — that is its own kind of love. And from where I sit, it is one of the greatest gifts one person can give another.

From where I sit, the smallest gifts are sometimes the ones that travel the farthest. And the most meaningful ones are the ones that find their way back.