Today my daughter taught me two valuable lessons. The first about drive and how the need to improve has to be motivated internally and secondly how compassion and caring has no age expectation or requirement but a genuine need to make another feel better.
A week ago She was given a project where she had to create a presentation about the canopy layer of the Taman Negara rainforest. She visited there a month ago and her presentation was on life cycles of the different sub species that she had researched. She felt that her presentation in class was not as good as she thought it could be and now in her holiday she redid the presentation and presented it to her grandmother on our visit to KL. She had no need to redo this project but she was upset that she could have done better and decided that she should redo it. As an adult, I have faced so many instances where I have passed work or a presentation and told myself I could have done better. She just taught me we strive to improve not to impress others but to impress/better ourselves.
Then tonight after a long night yesterday with her dance performances and flying in today and a late dinner, she spent the last 45 minutes putting moisturizer and scratching the legs of her grandmother, who is facing end stage bile duct cancer which has led to rising bilirubin levels causing a severe internal itch. No one had asked her to do this but she knew my mum, her grandmother would find it comforting. That's compassion and we all could learn from the gifts of our children.
She makes me proud.
