Growing Goodwill

Summer holidays in Mysuru meant playing on the street all day and eating mangoes by the crate. Back then composting and segregation weren't even popular or government mandated activities to do, but my mom would tell us to put the peels and seed of the mangoes that we ate back into the ground to help the soil become better. One of those seeds that we casually put into the ground grew up into the big mango tree in our house today.

For years, it did not even bear fruit, but birds came to rest in it, delighting my niece. People would come take some of its leaves for religious events happening at their homes. A couple of years ago the tree started sporadically giving out a few fruits, most of which were eaten away by squirrels or stolen by naughty neighbourhood children. It went on like that for many years where having this tree at home was a nice thing to have but mostly ignored.

This year, I was in Chennai hungering for my favourite Raspuri mangoes that for some reason was simply not available in the vicinity or could be shipped to Chennai. I hadn't visited home for a while due to the second wave of Covid and was missing my summer special Raspuris like crazy, and the season for them passed me by.

Or so I thought.

This year our tree gave out a hundred or so of these gorgeous beauties, and I came home after two and half months to be greeted by a bounty of my favourites.

Moral of the story? Quite simple really. My mom loves nature and invests in it without expecting a return, she inculcated these habits in us through example. The mangoes I ate today are a result of a single act of goodwill we practiced as a family without knowing how beautifully it'd surprise us almost twenty-five years down the line.

Goodwill is something that you invest in whenever you possibly can. Help out a team member who is under a lot of pressure, come to the aid of someone who needs it, opt for sustainable solutions wherever possible - do it without for once thinking about what's in it for me. Because goodwill has a way of finding you and giving back much more than you thought possible, even when you don't realise it.