The Generous Heart

There is a small set of grievances that most of us carry without noticing. A friend who failed to reply to a message or not quickly enough. A relative who forgot a birthday. A colleague who took credit, or a neighbour who didn't say thank you. A lover who let us down. These slights accumulate quietly, and before long we find ourselves keeping a ledger, a private account of wrongs, real and imagined, that colours how we see the people we are supposed to love.

The trouble with this ledger is that we are usually its sole auditor. We record every entry with great care. We rarely question whether the entry belongs there at all. Most of what we take personally was never meant personally. Most of what we call a slight is simply someone else being human: distracted, overwhelmed, afraid.

The friend who didn't come to your party was probably exhausted, not dismissive. The relative who snapped at you at Christmas was almost certainly carrying something you knew nothing about. The lover who should have shown up, was perhaps confused and upset. The colleague who seemed cold was, in all probability, lost in their own anxiety. We are not the centre of other people's stories, however much it feels that way from the inside.

Assuming positive intent is not naivety. It is a form of generosity, and like all generosity, it comes back to us. When we give people the benefit of the doubt, we free ourselves from the exhausting work of constructing narratives of betrayal. We stay in relationship. We stay open.

The people who love us are allowed to be imperfect

We reserve our harshest judgements for the people closest to us, which is, when you think about it, exactly backwards. We forgive strangers their rudeness, their mistakes, their clumsy manners (but not their driving!). But a parent who says the wrong thing, or a friend who isn’t there in a difficult moment, can earn a silent exile that we would never impose on an acquaintance.

The people who love us are the ones who have seen us at our worst and stayed. They have sat with us through the long nights and the bad decisions and the versions of ourselves we are least proud of. They are owed something for that. They should be given, as a minimum, the same patience we extend to people we have only just met.

Being quick to anger with those who love us is a way of punishing loyalty. It teaches the people in our lives that closeness is dangerous, that the nearer they get, the more exposed they become. Over time, they learn to keep a careful distance. And then we wonder why we feel alone.

 The art of being present without judging

When someone we care about comes to us in difficulty, when they have made a mistake, or are in pain, or simply need to say something out loud, what they almost never need is our verdict. They are not asking us to assess them. They are asking us to be there and to hear them.

This is harder than it sounds. We are trained, most of us, to fix things. To offer solutions, corrections, alternative perspectives. Especially us men who have a simple answer to every problem! We want to be useful, and we have confused being useful with being supportive. But a friend who is weeping over a relationship, or a sibling who has done something foolish, or a parent who is frightened, they are not problems to be solved. They are people who need to feel that they are not alone in the world.

The most generous thing we can do, in most of these moments, is to listen without preparing our response. To be a witness, not a judge. To say I hear you and mean it, without the silent addendum of but here is where you went wrong or this is what will fix it.

Non-judgement is not the same as having no opinions. You can think your friend is making a mistake and still choose, in this moment, not to say so. You can disagree with someone's choices and still make them feel loved. These things are not in conflict. They simply require that we place the relationship above the need to be right, something that I personally find almost impossible, even as I write this!

Second chances, and the courage they require

To believe in second chances is to believe in change, in the possibility that people are not fixed, that the person who let you down is not the only version of themselves that will ever exist. Sartre called this fixing in the eyes of the other the Medusa look: we render the person a stone version of themselves, based on their past, judging them, fixing them with our stare. Yet there is another side, the ‘pour soi” of future possibility. This is an act of imagination as much as generosity. It asks us to hold two pictures of someone at once: who they were when they failed us, and who they might yet become. Seeing someone as dynamic, with a different future, even as they let us down.

Some people will not change. That is also true, and we will come to it. But the default assumption that they won't, the pre-emptive withdrawal of trust before they have had the chance to try, forecloses something that might have been real. It also says something about us: that we believe people are essentially done, essentially fixed, essentially beyond the reach of growth. That is a bleak position to hold, and it tends to become self-fulfilling.

The person who receives a second chance and rises to it is not rare. We simply don't notice, because we were too busy not offering one.

Where the limits lie

None of this is an argument for limitless tolerance. Forgiveness is not the same as acquiescence, and assuming positive intent does not mean ignoring a pattern of deliberate harm. There are people who exploit generosity. There are behaviours that cannot be explained away as mere human imperfection. There are relationships that have become genuinely corrosive, where the cost of staying is paid entirely by one person, and the other person is not paying attention.

The limits are real. They are worth knowing. But they are also reached far less often than we think. Most of what we call an irreconcilable difference is a difference that was never really discussed. Most of what we call an unforgivable slight was simply never properly forgiven, not because it was unforgivable, but because we never sat down and tried.

The family feuds that nobody started

Somewhere in almost every extended family there is a rupture, a coldness, an absence, a set of relatives who are simply not spoken of. And if you ask the people involved what the original cause was, you will sometimes find that nobody can quite remember. The grievance has outlasted the memory of the grievance. What remains is not the wound but the scar tissue around it, a habit of estrangement that has calcified into something that feels like identity.

These feuds are among the saddest things in ordinary life, because they cost so much and yield so little. The cousins who have never met. The siblings who sit at separate ends of a funeral. The years that pass in silence while both parties wait for the other to make the first move, and both, in the end, run out of time.

If you are in one of these feuds, the question worth sitting with is simple: what is actually being protected here? Sometimes the answer is dignity, or safety, or a boundary that genuinely needed to be drawn. But sometimes, often, the answer is pride. A reluctance to be the one who blinks first. And pride is a very poor reason to spend a life estranged from people who, under different circumstances, you might have loved.

Years ago, due to a perceived slight around my treatment versus the more generous, in my eyes, treatment afforded to my brother, I walked out of my parents’ house vowing never to darken their door again. I was off to live in Paris and was angry.  My partner dragged me back and we all made up, in tears.  Without her help perhaps I would now no longer have a close family.  Hard to imagine, but in the white heat of that moment I could have thrown it all away.

The friendships we let fade

Alongside the feuds, there is a quieter and less dramatic loss: the friendships that simply drifted. Not broken, not ended, just gradually allowed to go quiet. The school friend you meant to call back. The colleague from the job before last that you didn’t meet for drinks. The neighbour who moved away. These are not estrangements, there was no falling out, no grievance, nothing to forgive. There was simply the ordinary friction of a busy life, and the slow accumulation of time.

What is worth remembering is that most people would still be glad to hear from you. The embarrassment of reaching out after a long silence is almost entirely one-sided. The person on the other end is generally delighted, surprised, perhaps, but delighted. The imagined awkwardness is far worse than the actual conversation.

Friendships, unlike many things, do not have an expiry date. They can be resumed. They are more resilient than we give them credit for. The question is simply whether we are willing to be the one who picks up the thread.

That second chance

There is a version of life in which we carry our grievances lightly, extend our patience generously, and give the people who love us room to be imperfect. It is not a passive or a sentimental life. It requires more of us than the alternative, more courage to stay open, more imagination to see past the immediate hurt, more willingness to be surprised by people.

But it is, by most measures, a better one. Not because goodness is rewarded in any tidy way, but because the posture of forgiveness changes us, it keeps us gentle where we might otherwise go harsh, and open where we might otherwise close. It keeps us in the world, in relation to other people, which is where, in the end, most of life actually happens.

The ledger of grievances is always available. It can wait. The friend you haven't called, the relative you've been avoiding, the apology you've been meaning to make, the lover you have cut off.  None of these calls will be easier tomorrow than they are today.

But, in the Moral Universe, that call, that reconnection, might mean everything.

Steve Robson is an impossible romantic, lapsed French literature academic, and sometime transaction banker, who divides his time between a Liverpool Street tower, arthouse cinemas, second hand bookshops and French cafés. A true believer that the unexamined life is not worth living and living proof that there is never an angst too far, he somehow manages to believe in nothing aside from a Camus inspired philosophy of human salvation and love, his hero’s passion for the beauty of an indifferent earth and more personally the élan and elegance of the Roger Federer backhand.