Magnanimous: Generous or forgiving; especially to a weak rival.
Collin’s Dictionary: If you are magnanimous, you behave kindly and generously towards someone, especially after defeating them or being treated badly by them. Synonyms: generous, noble, kind, selfless.
Vocabulary.com: A magnanimous person has a generous spirit. Letting your little sister have the last of the cookies, even though you hadn’t eaten since breakfast, would be considered a magnanimous act.
“Be about 10 times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be 100 times better for it.” – Cheryl Strayed
I was reading Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed on the plane when I came across this quote. It felt really important, so I asked my seat mate who had wifi on the plane if he knew what magnanimous meant.
He googled it for me.
When he gave me the definition I felt a little awestruck by it. What a beautiful word to combine generous, forgiving, kind and noble all into one package.
I don’t know how to be 10 times more magnanimous than I think I’m capable of being. But I think anything with odds that high is worth striving for. So I’ve been working on it.
Knowing who is a “weak rival” has been one of the hardest parts for me to sort out. I used to feel intimidated and insecure around everyone and I lived in fear of doing or saying something wrong. This constant underlying fear made me weak and I never felt like there was an obvious “weaker man” or rival.
One of my greatest life lessons to date has been realizing that our strength and power comes from truth, love, clarity and compassion. The more I stand up for a life that is based in these values, the more I’m seeing that anyone who resorts to treating another badly is the “weak rival”.
To clarify I define treating another badly as doing something that doesn’t line up with truth, love, and compassion.
This has been huge for me. It didn’t happen at once, it has happened slowly over time. I have had to first search for truth, love, and compassion within and for myself, and there were and still are lots of times it doesn’t immediately show up. But I keep searching until I find it.
Seeing the world through this lens has changed everything for me… and it has changed me in a big way for the better.
I see weakness in all of the people who I used to feel intimidated by, and I see strength, power, and greatness in people who are living from a place of truth, love, clarity, and compassion and from the people who are already magnanimous.
This is a beautiful space to see the world from and if I ever figure out how to be 10 times more of it than I think I’m capable of, I will let you know how I did it. Promise me you’ll do the same?