Free Buddhist Boot Camp by Timber Hawkeye Page B

anything we don’t all do every single day. She may have said it to me only once, but I continued calling myself fat and unattractive for years thereafter every time I looked in the mirror.
    Your words have tremendous power—even the words you say to yourself—so please choose them wisely.
    Your past mistakes guide you, not define you. —Anonymous

The Pain Behind Our Fears
    As her health and memory started to fade, my friend’s grandmother moved out of her home and into her daughter’s house for closer observation.
    We all thought it would be a wonderful idea for me to take care of the property (now that nobody was living in it), and perhaps even rent out a room or two, and have the money go toward Grandma’s expensive medicine and care.
    The house had fruit trees in the back yard, as did many houses in that neighborhood, and my plan was to collect the excess from the community and feed those in town who couldn’t feed themselves. With the abundance of food that would otherwise go to waste, nobody was to go hungry again.
    My friend and his wife had known me for many years and blindly trusted me to always work for the benefit of others. Strangely enough, however, when we approached his parents, aunts, and uncles with the proposal that I accept this unpaid caretaker position in good faith, and that I do everything I could to ease the family’s burden of worrying about the property, help with its upkeep and cleanup, and, of course, make sure everybody had a wonderful home to visit when they were in town, everyone thought it was a great idea except for my friend’s mom, who couldn’t see past her fears and lack of trust in other people (let alone a stranger).
    She was worried that I would intentionally burn down the house or something, and sue the family for all they had, or that I’d illegally sublet the rooms and pocket the rent, trash the place, or—and this she said with a great deal of sinister humor in her voice—if I really was as kind and generous as her son made me out to be, I would (God forbid) let homeless people sleep on the floor when it was cold outside.
    As it turns out, there was a lot of pain behind her fear. There always is. Any talk of someone living in her mother’s house just made the fact that her mother was dying a reality for her to have to accept, and she clearly wasn’t ready to do that.
    I flew back and forth to meet with everyone, and I even had an attorney draft an agreement that gave me no rights to any money or lawsuit under any provision whatsoever, with the intention to best protect the family’s interest and, most importantly, Grandma’s integrity, but her daughter still wouldn’t budge.
    This was very frustrating and sad to me at the time, and I did not understand why she wouldn’t accept someone’s generosity without thinking there was a “catch.”
    Has the majority of our population gotten this cynical, jaded and pessimistic and I haven’t noticed? Do people no longer believe in random acts of kindness and giving? If that’s the case, then we need to do more of it so that people believe again!
    Please don’t be discouraged by this story, but let it ignite the fire in your heart to give, forgive, and believe.
    A perfectly wonderful house is now a graveyard for cockroaches and geckos, falling apart because of mildew and neglect, which is what I imagine has happened to my friend’s mom’s heart as well.
    The important lesson I learned from this experience is that you can’t want something more for someone than they want for themselves, and that some people simply don’t believe in the light. (How could I have been so naive as to not know this before?) It doesn’t matter if you shine light in their faces, because if they don’t believe in it, they won’t see it.
    I realize now that it’s way more important to open our hearts than our eyes. If our hearts are closed, then it doesn’t matter what we’re looking at—we would never see everything as it truly is: