A Big Heart, Do You Have One?
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Every Wednesday evening two friends, Alex and Florian, and I meet for our stammtisch, a German tradition where friends regularly get together to hang out and drink. We do it via Zoom and we’ve been at it for months. We sometimes have a guest, and we always end up having interesting conversations. Last week’s topic was — you guessed it — big-heartedness.
In good philosophical tradition, we started by defining what we consider to be a big heart:
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Big hearts have an irresistible passion to serve others regardless of their status, without expecting any reward.
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Then we asked ourselves whether people are born with a big heart. Though genes may play a role, we had no doubt that life is the great creator of big hearts.
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We are not born with a big heart. We grow into it.
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The next step was then to explore factors that make us grow into big hearts and to identify what is it about these factors that help the heart grow. This is what we uncovered:
- Role models with big hearts
- Environments of friendship
- Experiences of service
- Downfalls in life that we breakthrough
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The final question we addressed was whether there is a point in life after which we can no longer grow the heart. We searched our “big heart database” and concluded that, provided the above factors, it is never too late.
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There is no deadline to grow our heart.
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So where are you on your big heart journey?
Can you identify your big heart role models and environments?
What experiences and breakthroughs have helped you grow into a bigger heart?
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