Sunday Reflections
At the end of last year, we sat in a restaurant with a dear friend and her daughter, and I asked everyone at the table a question: what is one quality you could practise deliberately in the new year, perhaps because it doesn’t come naturally to you?
Mine was generosity.
Maybe it’s because I grew up poor. Maybe it’s because I’ve always put other qualities first, like efficiency and competence. Or maybe generosity simply wasn’t among the gifts I arrived with. Whatever the reason, I’ve long noticed that I’m not as generous as I’d like to be. I admire it in others, yet it has never been the first thing I reach for.
So this year, wherever the choice is mine, I lean toward generosity, even when it leaves me with a little less.
We’ve spent a fair part of this year on Jeju, and I often hear that I’m different, in the way I speak and the way I write in Korean. That’s natural after three decades away. It isn’t my funny choice of words, though there is that too. It’s the way I approach people. Some say I’m more polite, and others say there is grace and patience in how I communicate.
They might be right. When someone gives me wrong directions and it takes me twenty more minutes to find the place, I reach for a more generous understanding: they offered their best intention, even if the result came out poorer. When a customer service agent remembers an event very differently than I do, I let generosity do the work. It’s possible they truly believe their version is the only truth, and that speaks not of bad intention but of where they stand. There is always a place of understanding to come from, and choosing it, to me, is generosity.
The past few days we’ve been working with a team of gardeners whose way of communicating is perhaps the furthest from mine. It isn’t for lack of effort. It’s simply how they do things. I wanted a firm quote of the cost and it never came. The work sounded like one day, then two, and I still don’t know how long it will take.
It’s frustrating, and yet I remind myself that their effort is earnest, and that a garden, like trust, takes as long as it takes. So I offer a generous amount of both and let them do their work. And the money? Well, that will sort itself out in time.
Do I have any regrets? No. Not because I have suddenly become a Buddha, but because of what this year has taught me: in giving, I receive so much more.
I began the year expecting generosity to leave me with a little less. It hasn’t. The stranger with the wrong directions, the agent with a different story, the gardeners and their open-ended days: when I honour them in their entirety, including their abundance of shortcomings, and mine, life flows more easily, and it feels richer too.
If you were at our table today, what quality would you choose to practise for the rest of this year?
