On generosity, snakes/hats and possibly dirty sheets...

On generosity, snakes/hats and  possibly dirty sheets...

Hi there!!

I had planned for this post to be about parenting, but  some things that have happened recently made me change my mind at the last minute. So, today I will be reflecting on generosity.

A few weeks ago, this very popular quote came up on my Instagram feed: “You don’t see the world as it is, but as you are”. What a cliché, right?  And yet, how true those words are!!

My mother and I have been Airbnb hosts for about five or six  years now. Our apartment is pretty big and since it is spread over two floors, it was quite simple to turn it into a duplex of sorts. Plus, with our neighborhood having undergone a dramatic “makeover” in recent years, our location effortlessly became ideal for hosting Mexico City visitors.

It’s been a smooth road for the most part, with rocky patches here and there. As one fellow host said during an Airbnb get-together I was invited to, “In all fairness, the vast majority of guests are really nice”.

Beyond the very welcome extra cash it provides at the end of the month, which is obviously the main reason why we decided to give hosting a shot in the first place, this experience has been rewarding in other ways too.

For one thing, it’s helped me discover a whole new side to my personality, which I never knew existed. I found out I can be quite the people person; easily and efficiently interacting with guests, answering their questions, making recommendations for restaurants, museums and other places of interest, problem solving, etc.

I also enjoy coming up with new ideas  about how to make our guests’ stay more pleasant and fun. Before a guest arrives, I always double-check that  the apartment is spotless and that it feels cozy and welcoming.

 In return for our efforts, most guests are gracious and kind; they are basically your all-around good, decent people. They make hosting easy and in some cases, a genuine connection is created between them and us. Regardless of their length, we truly feel these meaningful human interactions (that both overcome and embrace personal, cultural and linguistic differences) nourish our spirit.

However, and more to the point of this post, we do get the odd “difficult” guest. It takes a number of characterics to make up this particular profile which we are all bound to encounter from time to time. The following adjectives come to mind: picky, rude, inconsiderate, fussy, unrealistically demanding, passive-aggressive, etc, but I think “ungenerous” pretty much  sums it up.

I think generosity or lack thereof, acts as a powerful filter of perception. I believe it determines how much or how little enjoyment, meaning and magic we can derive from life.

Let me be clear on this. It’s not that I am not open to suggestions as to how we could be better hosts, as I firmly believe there is always room for improvement.  It’s the outlandish complaints and demands that some guests come up with, along with the weird behavior they sometimes display, that get not only to me, but to many other hosts as well.

I am part of an informal Facebook group where hosts usually ask questions  or share ideas that have worked for them.  More often than you might think, though, they  also use it as a safe place to vent their frustration, caused by difficult guests.

For instance:

Guests that will have nothing but smiles and compliments for you during their stay and then will trash your place on their public evaluation.

Guests that will complain and sometimes even cancel their reservation one or two days into their stay because of situations that you clearly specified on the listing description as drawbacks of your place, over which you have little or no control whatsoever, such as there being a construction site on your block or noise coming from a bar across the street.

Guests who can’t be bothered to read the house rules (despite having to agree to them before making a reservation), who then break a rule during their stay and end up giving  you a bad review because you called them out on it.

People who make demands and complaints as if they were guests at the Waldorf Astoria while in fact they are probably paying you less for a whole apartment than what a Motel 6 type room would have cost them.

Guests who, in spite of Airbnb’s extensive advertising and marketing campaings, simply do not get the basic fact that a listed property  is not supposed to offer you a “hotel like” experience but rather the chance to “live like a local”, meaning, having access to somebody’s home, with everything that’s good about that (being welcomed into a cozy and warm environment, even into a  family, sometimes getting to celebrate holidays such as Christmas with your hosts or being nursed if you become sick, being given the best advice on how to make the most of your stay, etc.) AND everything that might not be “so good” about it (yes, there might be pets, yes you might hear kids running in the room above yours, yes you might involuntarily end up taking a cold shower if someone in the household decides to use the washing machine at that precise moment).

I could go on...

Please note, though, that I am not talking about your nastier, crazier or outright antisocial kind of guest, the sort that hits on your cleaning lady ( it happened to us), damages or breaks furniture, throws a wild party and leaves your apartment floor strewn with used condoms or stages a burglary, steals from you and on top of it all, cancels half-way through their stay (claiming not to feel safe) and demands a full refund (these last two things happened to two different hosts on the FB group.) This kind of behaviour is on a whole other level of insanity  and we all pray daily to the patron saint of hosts to keep our homes safe from that horrid type of guest.

I am referring to a much more common, more “normal”, ungenerous disposition.

Being a psychologist, I often think of our little hosting venture as the perfect window into people’s inner makeup.

Just this morning, a guest left. He was a really kind and polite man. He thanked me and said: “The apartment is beautiful and everything was great”.

Meanwhile, two days ago, a previous guest wrote on his evaluation, among other unflattering things, that “the sheets didn’t look or feel clean”.

In all the years we’ve been hosting, NO ONE had ever complained about “dirty” sheets. Again, I am not saying his assessment is necessarily inaccurate; no one can be on top of everything all the time.

 However, it did seem odd to me that not once during his stay did he say a single word about his sheets “not looking or feeling clean”. And what’s more, although his original reservation was for two nights, he requested to change it to add a third one... Now, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t enjoy sleeping one night, let alone three, in smelly sheets.

 What I believe happened (and I actually told my mother I thought  things might play out this way) is he got mad at me for calling him out on breaking the “no one besides guests allowed in the apartment” rule when he invited a girl over. Giving me a bad review was simply his way of “getting even”.

Why is it, do you think, that while one guest asked if I could remove my dogs from my (and my dog’s) house during her stay because “they upset her poodle", another (a ten year old girl), spent as much time as she could petting them and even bought them a hair brush and some treats with her own  money?

How come a guest goes to the trouble of bringing my son a colorful T-shirt and a stuffed Koala bear all the way from Australia, his homeland, when another one leaves behind a whole bunch of trash and old food in the fridge for us to get rid of after he’s gone?

There’s this John Mayer song called “Slow dancing in a burning room” and at some point the lyrics go: “You´ll be a bi#$% because you can...”.  I wonder, though: “Are we sometimes a bi%$# because we CAN, or rather because we CAN’T be anything else, because we are not generous enough?

I guess for someone to be generous in any way, it must be a prerequisite that they do not feel like they, themselves, are just barely getting by... What do I mean by this? As they say, “you cannot give what you don’t have”; so, for someone to be able to offer  kindness, compassion, respect and empathy to their fellow humans and the world at large, they must have a sense, however faint, that they won’t be deprived if they share, that there is more than enogh to go around.

Personally, I have a tendency to err on the side of being a “softie” and more often than not, letting people off the hook a tad too easily. Even so, I am convinced a little more generosity wouldn't hurt any of us. I love this quote by the Dalai Lama:" Be kind whenever possible; it is always possible".

For me, trying to be kinder and more generous has involved a lot of work on myself and my personal history. 

It has  entailed trying to always measure others by the same yardstick by which I measure myself and viceversa.

 It’s required questioning societal and cultural views that teach us shame and self-hatred and would have us  believe there are first, second, and third class human beings.

But mostly, it has meant developing a deeper perception of myself and everything around me, one that has allowed me to realize we are all forever bound to one another by mysterious, sacred and unbreakable ties. It has meant finding  a way to the inexhaustible source of love, by grace of which we are all one.

It is really a win-win situation. Indeed, the better we become at cutting the circumstances and the people in our lives some slack, the happier we are likely to feel.

 After all, who would you rather be: the angry guest, fuming all day because  a sudden internet problem is taking too long to fix,  or the one who takes an unexpected water shortage and the resulting impossibility of taking a shower in his stride, not letting that affect his mood  too much? Which of the two, do you think, will go back home with more happy memories?

I remember someone once telling me while we were discussing a difficult person: “You’re lucky; you only had to put up with them for a day or two, whereas they have to put up with themselves every single day of their life”.

Amen to that…

I guess it’s all too easy to complain about “the hair in the soup” as we say here in Mexico; after all, most of us have been conditioned to “find fault” practically since birth.

However, as another staple of social media posts (and not in the least less beautiful for that) cautions: life is infinitely richer for those who know the secret to uncovering a snake with an elephant in its belly where most people only see a hat. Bless you Little Prince…

May your heart, and mine, always overflow with generosity...

Find me on Instagram: manzana_iridiscente12

Or write to me at: theiridescentapple@yahoo.com

I'd certainly love to hear (read) your thoughts on this and other matters...

Do you enjoy reading in Spanish and/or Portuguese? If so, you might like my other blogs manzanairidiscente.blogspot.com and amacairidescente.blogspot.com, where I share different stories, all of them however, told from the point of view of "the secret shimmer of everything".

Pic credits (all on Unsplash.com)

1. Jean Lakosnyk

2. Norwood themes

3. Nadine Shaabana

4. Natalie Collins