16.10.2026 Diary XLVI Kharis: given with no return expected

16.10.2026 Diary Page XLVI

Receiving can be harder than giving. Especially for someone who writes down everything they receive in a ledger.

Friday. The last working day of the week, and once again I started the morning with a list of things not done. There is nothing big on the list. There are small things, and each one stands there like a debt.

Today's word is kharis. What comes without expecting anything in return. The reason I chose the word is my relationship with the debt ledger. I write down the things I haven't done, and I write down the things given to me too. I hold both like something that has to be paid back.

A word with three meanings

In Greek, kharis carries too much to be said in a single word: grace, gift, kindness, gratitude. And also beauty, charm. At first glance these seem unrelated. The same word says both "this was given to me" and "how beautiful."

Linguists connect the word with the verb chairo, to rejoice, and with chara, joy. I know this as a widely accepted view, but I am not sure enough to go into the details. When eu, that is, good, is joined with kharis, you get eucharistia: thanksgiving. In modern Greek, "thank you" is still efharistó. The word charisma also comes from the same root.

I am writing these connections not as proof but as my own interpretation: a gift gives joy, and joy makes the thing it gives beautiful. Maybe that is why the words stand side by side in Greek.

Three sisters

In Hesiod's Theogony, the Charites appear as the three daughters of Zeus and Eurynome: Aglaia, Euphrosyne, Thalia. Their names have to do with brightness, cheer and festivity. They passed into Latin as the Gratiae. Gratia is also the root of the English words "gratitude" and "grace."

Seneca, in De Beneficiis, describes them dancing in a ring, holding hands. In his interpretation, a kindness passes from hand to hand and returns to where it started. Seneca himself does not take this interpretation very seriously, yet he keeps the image. I keep it too, because it looks not like a table of debts but like a dance.

Aristotle in two places

In the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, while talking about mutual exchange, Aristotle says that the temple of the Charites was built in a public place. The aim was to encourage people to give back. This is the nature of kharis, he says: to repay kindness with kindness, and then to be the one who starts the kindness. The source of this anecdote is a short passage, and I am summarising it in my own sentences.

In the second book of the Rhetoric, he says something else. There, kharis is help given to someone who needs it, not to get something in return, but for that person's sake. That is, the giver keeps no account.

The two may look contradictory. Not to me. One looks from the giver's eyes, the other from the receiver's. The giver keeps no ledger, the receiver does not forget. But the receiver's remembering is not a payment, it is carrying the ring on: one day giving to someone else what was given to me.

In the fourth book of the Nicomachean Ethics there is an observation that stirred something in me. The great-souled person remembers the kindnesses they have done, but hardly remembers the kindnesses they have received, because the one who receives is placed below the one who gives. Aristotle describes this as an ideal, but while reading it I saw myself. On the giving side I am at ease, on the receiving side my feet don't touch the ground.

Gratitude and debt

In Turkish this confusion is inside the word. Feeling minnet, gratitude, is a beautiful thing; being under minnet is heavy. And we also say "minnet borcu," a debt of gratitude. The same word carries both thanks and burden.

Law stands in a different place here. The Turkish Code of Obligations regulates the gift contract under a separate heading, from Article 285 onward: a benefit given without receiving anything in return. There is no payment plan for what you receive. As long as no condition is attached to it, there is no burden of payment either. Even law has had to name giving without return, because the assumption that everything has its price is that widespread.

Marcel Mauss's famous study of the gift shows the opposite: in many societies a gift creates an obligation to give back. That is true too. But the claim of kharis is subtler. The return goes back not to the giver but into circulation.

The I-didn't-do-enough ledger

The evening of a day with ADHD works like this: what wasn't done is clear, what was done is blurry. With time blindness the day flows away, and in the evening I don't remember what I finished. What I didn't do, on the other hand, stands there as a list, like unclosed tabs. I wrote about this mechanism in the time blindness article. Today I see another side of it: this asymmetry works like an ingratitude machine. I don't see what I have, I count what is missing.

"I didn't do enough" is a debt sentence. There is an unpaid amount owed to someone or something. I never ask who the creditor is. If I asked, on most days I would notice that the creditor is me, because I am also the one keeping the accounts.

After a diagnosis it is very easy to look back and keep accounts with "if only I had known." Someone who got diagnosed at twenty-two can write the years before that age into the debt ledger too. The thing I described in the perfectionism article and this ledger are written with the same pen.

Kharis opens a second column next to this ledger. Not the things not done, but the things given. What was given to me today? A coffee. A walk in Ankara's cooling air. Something I made with my own hands in the kitchen. The notebook sitting in its place on my desk. These did not come because I earned something. They were given.

I think the really hard part is this: being able to say thank you for them without going into debt over them. As I wrote in the shame and self-compassion article, even being gentle with myself can turn into a test of deserving. On the oikeiosis day I wrote that looking after yourself holds on a bad day too. Today is another face of the same idea: something may have been given to me on a bad day too.

Starting medication for the second time at twenty-eight was also a kind of receiving. Accepting help. For someone who is at ease when giving and struggles when receiving, this has its own weight. Kharis does not suggest turning that weight into a payment. It suggests taking it and carrying it from one place to another.

On the epokhe day I also wrote about not hurrying to pass judgment in the evening. Maybe this evening, before closing the account book, I will leave the judgment in suspension for one night.

The lightness of thanks

When I receive something, my first reflex is to calculate what I owe in return. Even thanks can get into this calculation. A thank-you said quickly and too much can be a way of closing the debt fast. A real thank-you would be slower and lighter. It would not ask for more than saying "I received it, it was lovely."

I ask myself: can I hold something in my hands for a while, just like that, without paying it back? Like a hot tea I don't have to finish before it cools.

In ADHD, everything that waits tends to turn into a task. Even a gift turns into a task: it has to be returned, remembered, and if it is forgotten, it is shameful. Kharis is not an item on a to-do list. First it is received, then one day, without rushing, it passes from hand to hand.

A piece next to the concept

Johann Sebastian Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 3, Air (BWV 1068).

The second movement of the suite in D major. The other movements have trumpets and timpani; in this movement only the strings and the continuo play. The melody stretches out in long, calm notes, while the bass walks step by step beneath it. When the suite was written is not certain. Whether it belongs to the Köthen years or to Leipzig is still debated.

The name "Air on the G String" came later. In 1871 August Wilhelmj arranged the piece for violin and piano and moved the melody down so it could be played on the G string alone. Bach himself never knew this name.

Its link with kharis is this: the piece asks for nothing. The long notes come and go, the bass beneath them does not move from its place. As if it only gives, without expecting anything back from the listener.

Toward tomorrow

Tomorrow is Saturday. Kharis was the dance of giving and receiving; tomorrow's word is sophrosyne. Keeping both receiving and giving within measure, holding yourself back. Today I softened the account book. Tomorrow I will look at the measure of that book: how much is enough?