Life Is More Generous Than You Think

Hi there,

I've been thinking about the way life gives you things. Not in the way you expect. Not on the timeline you'd choose. And not in the exact package you imagined.

But it gives them to you anyway. And if you pay attention, you start to notice that life is far more generous than you thought.

It's just generous in ways that you weren’t expecting.

I heard a podcast last week about a guy who grew up watching his mom work herself to exhaustion. They were dirt poor and she worked three jobs, came home, and collapsed on the coach.

His entire mission in life was organized around one dream: he wanted his mom to never work again. It was the kind of dream that shapes a person. And I thought, I know that dream. I had the same exact dream because of my own history.

Years ago, something difficult happened in my family. It was the kind of thing that breaks your world open and forces you to decide who you're going to be in the aftermath. I decided I was going to be someone who fights through the situation and doesn't accept the first no. I didn’t have any kind of big, master plan. I just knew I was going to push through whatever resistance showed up. I decided I was going to become a person who will survive what was happening.

And then something interesting occurred. Because I had adopted that identity and that story about myself, I made different choices. I was willing to fight things I wouldn't normally fight. I had conversations I wouldn't normally have. And I stayed in the ring longer than the old me would have. (Side note, all of this sounds very heroic. But in reality, it mostly looked like me on hold with various institutions for hours, seething quietly into my kitchen counter.)

Regardless, one day I realized: hey, my mom doesn't work! And she doesn’t ever need to work another day in her life!!

Funny thing is that I hadn’t strategically planned anything. I just to had become the kind of person whose presence in the world changed her reality. As tough as that situation was, life saw my vision and had handed me the opportunity to become the person who could create that outcome.

Years later, I had another vision for my own life. I wanted to live in London and the US. Not as a fantasy or a someday dream, but as an actual lived reality. And I held onto that pretty clearly then made moves that would make it so I could let myself want it without apology.

And it happened. Except it didn't happen the way I would have designed it!

Now, I live in both places. The logistics are messier than I would have written if I'd been in charge. But the core of what I wanted — to live in both locations, to have that dual existence, to say "I want both" and actually mean it, that's real.

Life didn't give me the perfect version. But it gave me a version that would require me to stretch into it.

And I think that's the secret about life's generosity. It's not that life is withholding what you want. It's that life is giving it to you in a form that requires you to grow into it. (Which sounds beautiful. But it also sounds like a lot of work nobody warned you about when you were putting things on vision boards.)

The path it takes often involves more struggle, more uncertainty, more "this isn't what I imagined" than you'd prefer. But it also involves more adventure and aliveness than the the perfect version in your head. When life gives you something the hard way and makes you fight for it, when it requires you to become someone new, and it comes disguised as something else — then you actually earn it.

READER POLL

Final Thought

I think most of us are waiting for life to hand us exactly what we asked for, wrapped up in a nice, neat bow, on time.

Here's what I'm learning about generosity.

We think generosity means getting exactly what we asked for, in the form we imagined, on the timeline we wanted. But that's not how life works. Life is generous in a much stranger way. It gives you what you actually need and often disguised as something else entirely.

To me that mystery is the transformative power of love and grace. Because what you're actually getting isn't just the thing you wanted. You're getting the transformed version of yourself that comes with it.

Here's something to consider:

What are you waiting for life to give you? And what if it's already trying to, just not in the form you expected? What if the generosity is already happening, and you're just looking for it in the wrong shape?

Stay open. The best gifts rarely arrive in the packaging we imagined.

Your focus shapes your reality.

Shift it.

Shakila