Here at our house on Chicago’s South Side, we’ve been working on some mid-winter home improvement projects: organizing pantry shelves; culling closets; restoring a semblance of order to the basement’s chaotic corners.
Our “to do” list, while lengthy, pales in comparison to the “to do” list I recently saw of our clients Peter Brill and Wendy Lewis. You might recall Peter and Wendy, whom we featured in our client spotlight last April. They’re traveling around the world in their sailboat, Pinecone. Peter, Wendy, and Pinecone are currently sailing off the coast of Chile, making their wind-powered way down South America’s western edge.
On their blog, Wendy and Peter posted a photo of their “strike-through” list – everything they either need to do or would like to do. The list is dozens of items long. And, remarkably, at least for the moment, all the items are crossed off. Every single one.
OK, of course, new stuff will come up. That’s inevitable. But for that moment, they were on top of things.
I have to admit: the vision of a strike-through list so thoroughly attended to evoked in me a mix of pleasure and admiration.
Is there a word for this feeling? I wondered.
It’s definitely not schadenfreude – the German word meaning “the pleasure arising from someone else’s misfortune.” That’s something like an antonym for this feeling I had.
For a minute or two, I started inventing words in German – a language, I confess, I don’t speak. Then I turned to Google, which pointed me in the direction of ancient Indian languages like Pali and Sanskrit. There is a concept, arising from ancient Buddhism, called mudita: it’s an expression of joyfulness when others succeed – a delight in the well-being of other people, without envy or conflict.
Lingering on mudita, I was struck by the importance of this concept in our everyday work at Park Piedmont. One of the ongoing, high-priority aspects of our work is walking our clients through the “to do” lists of your lives – working collaboratively and patiently to plan ahead, be prepared, check off boxes and “tend one’s own garden.”
Now, tending one’s own garden doesn’t mean that one gets a free pass to ignore the larger currents shaping our world. But it does recognize, at the same time, that the little pieces of our lives – all those responsibilities and requirements, small and large – remain important, for you and for us. Beneficiary designations sometimes need updating; retirement contributions, once made, ought to be invested; and apparently, every so often, the decks of boats need to be scrubbed.
Mudita gives us a word for this feeling we frequently get: when your “to do” lists get taken care of, our team delights in your sense of accomplishment and peace of mind.