January: Created to Add Value
Day 29 — 29 January
The Fragrance You Leave Behind
“Because of the fragrance of your good ointments, your name is ointment poured forth; therefore the virgins love you.” — Song of Solomon 1:3 (NKJV)
I was sitting in a coffee shop last autumn, waiting for a friend who was running late, and while I was sitting there a woman walked past my table on her way to the door, and even though I never saw her face and she did not say a word to me, something about her presence lingered in the air after she had gone. It was not perfume, exactly, although there was a trace of something pleasant in the space she had passed through, but the thing I noticed most was something harder to name, a quality that her brief passage through the room had left behind, the sense that whoever she was, she carried herself with a warmth and a quiet confidence that made the air around her feel slightly different from the air she had not passed through. She was gone in five seconds, and I never saw her again, and yet the impression she left in those five seconds stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon, not because she had done anything remarkable but because there was something about the way she moved through the world that had a fragrance to it, something that outlasted her physical presence and continued to affect the atmosphere of the room after the room no longer contained her.
I begin with that small, unremarkable moment because it is the most accurate picture I know of what the Song of Solomon was describing when it said, “your name is ointment poured forth,” because this verse, buried inside the most intimate and most frequently misunderstood book in the entire Bible, contains a truth about the nature of personal impact that connects directly to everything we have been building throughout this first month of the devotional.
The Hebrew word for “ointment” is shemen (שֶׁמֶן, meaning “oil,” “ointment,” “perfumed oil,” or “richness”), and in the ancient Near East, shemen was one of the most valuable substances a person could possess, used for anointing kings, consecrating priests, honouring guests, healing wounds, and softening skin that had been cracked and dried by the desert climate. Good shemen was not cheap, because it was produced through a process of crushing aromatic plants, seeds, or resins until their essential oils were released, and the quality of the fragrance was directly proportional to the quality of the crushing, which meant that the most exquisite shemen came from the materials that had been pressed the hardest and the longest.
But the detail that makes this verse so striking is not the word shemen itself but what Solomon said happens to it: “your name is ointment poured forth.” The Hebrew word for “poured forth” is turaq (תּוּרַק, meaning “poured out,” “emptied,” or “transferred from one vessel into the open air”), and the image it creates is of a sealed flask of precious perfumed oil being opened so that its fragrance, which was previously contained and private, is released into the surrounding atmosphere where everyone present can experience it. While the flask is sealed, the fragrance exists but nobody benefits from it, because the oil is contained within a vessel that keeps its richness to itself. But the moment the flask is opened, the moment the shemen is turaq, the fragrance fills the room and transforms the experience of everyone in it, not because the oil has changed its nature but because it has been released from the container that was holding it in.
And then Solomon drew a connection that most readers pass over without realising how profound it is: he said “your name is ointment poured forth,” which means the person’s shem (שֵׁם, meaning “name,” “reputation,” “character,” or “the total impression a person makes on the world”) is itself the ointment. The person’s name, their character, the sum total of who they are and how they move through the world, functions the same way that poured-forth shemen functions in a room: it fills the space, it transforms the atmosphere, and it lingers long after the person has left, affecting everyone who passes through the air they once occupied.
What Makes a Name Fragrant?
This is where I want to draw the metaphor into the kind of territory that will follow you out of this page and into the rest of your day, because the question Solomon’s image provokes is not simply “Do you have a fragrance?” since every person leaves some kind of impression in the spaces they pass through, but rather “What does your fragrance smell like, and does it linger for the right reasons?”
Think about the people you know whose presence leaves the room better than they found it, the friend whose visit makes your home feel warmer for hours after they have gone, the colleague whose contribution to a meeting changes the tenor of the entire conversation even after they have stopped speaking, the neighbour whose greeting in the morning carries enough genuine warmth to shift the temperature of your whole day. These are people whose shem is shemen turaq, whose character is ointment poured forth, and the fragrance they leave behind is not manufactured, not performed, and not dependent on anyone noticing it, because fragrance does not require an audience to fill a room. It fills the room because that is what poured-forth ointment does, regardless of whether anyone is paying attention.
And now think about the opposite, because honesty requires it: think about the people whose departure from a room produces relief rather than loss, the people whose name, when mentioned in conversation, creates a subtle tension in the atmosphere rather than a warmth, the people whose presence you endure rather than enjoy, not because they are unkind in any obvious way but because the fragrance they carry is tinged with something that makes the air around them slightly harder to breathe. Their shem is also shemen, because every life produces a fragrance of some kind, but the oil that has been released from their flask carries the scent of self-absorption, or criticism, or the kind of quiet superiority that makes other people feel smaller rather than larger in their presence.
The difference between these two kinds of fragrance is not a matter of personality or natural temperament, because some of the most fragrant people I have ever known were quiet, introverted, and naturally reserved, while some of the most suffocating presences I have encountered were outgoing, charismatic, and socially gifted. The difference is in what has been poured into the flask over time, because the quality of the shemen is determined by what went into the crushing process, and a life that has been filled with the kind of ingredients we have explored throughout this month, the identity of Day 1, the craftsmanship of Day 2, the salt and light of Day 3, the compassionate seeing of Day 4, the genuine becoming of Day 5, the generosity of Day 6, the settled worth of Day 7, and the twenty-two entries that followed, will produce a fragrance that is unmistakable, not because the person tries to smell good but because what is inside the flask is genuinely good, and when the flask is opened through the ordinary interactions of daily life, the goodness fills the room on its own.
The Crushing That Produces the Fragrance
There is one more dimension of Solomon’s metaphor that I want to place in your hands before we close, because it addresses something that every person who is serious about adding value to the world will eventually encounter, and it is the uncomfortable reality that the finest fragrance comes from the hardest pressing.
The shemen of the ancient world was not produced by gently asking the olives to release their oil. It was produced by crushing them under enormous stones, by pressing them until their cellular structure broke down and the oil that was locked inside the flesh of the fruit was forced out through pressure that the olives themselves could not have survived intact. The process was violent, exhausting, and transformative, and the resulting oil was valuable precisely because of what it had cost to produce it.
This is not a comfortable truth, and I will not pretend otherwise, but it is a truth that connects the crushing seasons of your life to the fragrance you carry out of them, because the people whose presence fills a room with the richest and most lingering fragrance are almost always people who have been through something that pressed them harder than they thought they could bear. The divorce that nearly broke you, the illness that rewrote your understanding of your own body, the betrayal that shattered a trust you thought was unbreakable, the financial crisis that stripped away every external source of security, each of these is a pressing, and the pressing hurts, and nobody would choose it, and yet the oil that emerges from the other side of it, the compassion, the depth, the gentleness, the hard-won wisdom, the capacity to sit with someone in their pain without flinching because you know exactly what that pain tastes like, is the most exquisite shemen the world has ever encountered.
The woman who walked past my table in that coffee shop carried a fragrance that I suspect was produced by something far more costly than anything she purchased from a bottle, because the quality of warmth and quiet confidence that lingered in her wake was the kind of thing that only comes from a life that has been pressed and has allowed the pressing to produce oil rather than bitterness, and the distinction between those two outcomes, oil or bitterness, is one of the most consequential choices any human being ever makes.
The thought to carry into this twenty-ninth morning of the new year is one that connects the month you have just lived through to the person you are becoming in the process of living it: your name is ointment poured forth, and the fragrance you leave behind in every room, every conversation, and every relationship you pass through today is not something you perform but something you release, and the quality of what is released is determined by the quality of what has been poured in, pressed out, and carried inside the flask of a life that was created, from its very first breath, to add value to the world by leaving it more fragrant than it was before you arrived.
Declaration
I leave a fragrance behind me today, and the fragrance is not something I manufacture through effort or performance but something that flows naturally from the shemen that the pressing seasons of my life have produced inside me. My shem is ointment poured forth, and the rooms I pass through today carry the scent of who I am long after I have left them, not because I try to leave an impression but because the flask is open and the oil is genuine and the atmosphere responds to the quality of what has been released into it. The crushing did not destroy me; it produced something in me that could not have existed without the pressure, and the compassion, the depth, the warmth, and the quiet confidence that others encounter in my presence are the fragrance of a life that chose oil over bitterness when the pressing came. I am poured forth today, and the pouring is not loss but release, and the release fills every space I enter with the unmistakable scent of a life that was made to add value by leaving the world more fragrant than it found it.
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