Inheritance

There is an old story about a family who lived in a small house beside a river. For generations, whenever the rainy season came and the water began creeping towards their door, they would place towels along the floor, move their belongings onto higher shelves and wait for the water to retreat. The grandfather had done it, then the father, and eventually the son grew old enough to help. Nobody questioned the ritual because it was simply what their family had always done. One year, however, the son looked at the soaked towels scattered across the floor and asked a question nobody before him had thought to ask: “Why don’t we build something outside to stop the water from coming in?” His father stared at him, almost offended by the simplicity of the suggestion, and replied, “Because this is how we have always dealt with the rain.” The son loved his father, respected his grandfather and understood why they had done what they did, but he also understood something else: honouring the people who came before us does not require us to inherit every problem they learned to tolerate.

I thought about that little story when I came across today’s writing prompt: What’s something you do completely differently from how you were raised? At first, it sounded like one of those questions that should have an easy answer. Perhaps I could write about money, relationships, communication, work, household routines or any of the countless small ways adulthood eventually separates us from the homes that raised us. But the longer I sat with the question, the less interested I became in identifying one particular habit. What caught my attention instead was the word differently, because somewhere along the way we have made doing things differently from our parents sound almost synonymous with rejecting them.

I don’t think it has to be.

As children, we rarely understand that we are being taught a particular way of living. We simply assume that what happens inside our home is how life works everywhere. The way adults communicate, argue, apologise, spend money, express affection, respond to failure, divide responsibilities, deal with relatives and survive difficult periods quietly becomes our first curriculum. Nobody hands us a textbook called How to Be a Person. We learn by observation, absorbing rules nobody necessarily says aloud. Some of those lessons become beautiful foundations we carry throughout adulthood. Others become beliefs we eventually have to examine and decide whether they still deserve a place in the life we are building.

Growing up Filipino added another layer to that inheritance. There is so much about the culture I remain deeply grateful for: the importance of family, hospitality that somehow finds another plate even when the table already looks full, respect for elders, generosity, faith, humour during difficult circumstances and the instinct to look after one another. There is something beautiful about growing up understanding that life is rarely meant to be lived entirely for ourselves. Even after building a life far from home, those values remain recognisable in me. Distance has changed many things, but it has never made home irrelevant.

Yet adulthood has also taught me that loving where we came from does not prevent us from questioning some of what came with it. In fact, perhaps genuine gratitude requires enough maturity to distinguish between values worth preserving and patterns worth reconsidering. Not everything inherited is an heirloom; some things are simply habits that survived long enough to become tradition. Once I understood that, doing certain things differently stopped feeling like rebellion and began feeling more like discernment.

One of the biggest differences in how I now try to live is my relationship with boundaries. I grew up with a strong understanding that family helps family, that you show up when somebody needs you and that sometimes personal inconvenience is simply part of loving people. I still believe in that. What has changed is my understanding of where generosity ends and responsibility begins. As I have grown older, I have realised that helping someone does not automatically mean becoming responsible for every consequence of their decisions, and loving someone does not require repeatedly sacrificing your own stability to prevent them from experiencing theirs.

That was difficult for me to learn because saying no can feel especially uncomfortable when you have been raised to associate goodness with accommodation. There is always another reason to help, another circumstance deserving sympathy and another voice inside your head asking whether you could perhaps give just a little more. Compassion matters enormously to me, but I am beginning to understand that compassion without discernment can quietly become exhaustion. There is a difference between carrying someone’s burden beside them and carrying a burden that was never yours to begin with. Learning that distinction has not made me less caring; I think it has made the care I give more intentional.

I also think differently about respect. When I was younger, respect often seemed connected to age, authority and silence. Adults knew more because they had lived longer, and disagreeing could easily be interpreted as disrespect. As I grew older, particularly through education, work and simply encountering people from different backgrounds, I began understanding respect as something more reciprocal. I can honour someone’s experience without surrendering my own judgement. I can listen carefully and still disagree. I can speak politely without becoming silent. Perhaps one of adulthood’s most important lessons is discovering that having your own voice does not mean you have stopped respecting the voices that taught you how to speak.

The same applies to emotions. Many of us were raised by generations who survived circumstances that demanded extraordinary resilience. They learned to continue because stopping was often a luxury they did not possess. Problems were endured, responsibilities were completed and life moved forward. I admire that strength, but I also recognise that endurance and emotional wellbeing are not always the same thing. Sometimes people become exceptionally good at surviving without ever being given permission to acknowledge how much survival cost them.

I want to do that part differently. I want to be able to say when something hurts instead of believing silence automatically makes me stronger. I want difficult conversations to happen before resentment has had years to become permanent. I want apologies to be spoken rather than assumed, affection expressed rather than merely understood, and gratitude said while the person receiving it is still present to hear it. Some generations expressed love primarily through sacrifice; perhaps ours can honour that sacrifice by becoming better at giving love a language as well.

Losing people has probably made that lesson more important to me. Death has a ruthless way of revealing how many things we assume we will have time to say later. We postpone conversations because tomorrow feels dependable, and then occasionally life reminds us that it never signed such an agreement. Because of that, I have become increasingly convinced that affection should not always remain implicit. If somebody matters to me, I want them to know. If I am grateful, I want to say it. If I have caused harm, I want to become better at acknowledging it. There are already enough things in life beyond our control; leaving love unnecessarily unspoken does not need to be one of them.

I have also become more comfortable with the idea that changing my mind is not evidence of weak character. There were beliefs I inherited simply because they were the first beliefs available to me, and there were expectations I once assumed were universal because everyone around me seemed to share them. Adulthood has introduced me to different cultures, personalities, families and ways of constructing a meaningful life. Some encounters strengthened what I had already been taught, while others forced me to reconsider it. I think that is what growing up should do. If adulthood merely turns us into louder versions of everything we were taught as children, then perhaps we have grown older without necessarily growing wiser.

Living away from the Philippines has intensified that process because distance gives perspective in peculiar ways. You begin noticing things about your upbringing that were invisible when you were immersed in them. Some traditions become more precious because you finally understand what they gave you, while others become easier to question because you discover that there are perfectly good people living meaningful lives according to completely different rules. Being exposed to another culture did not erase mine. If anything, it made me more deliberate about which parts of it I wanted to protect.

Perhaps that is the real privilege of adulthood: we eventually become curators of our inheritance. We receive an enormous collection from the people who raised us—beliefs, habits, fears, strengths, traditions, wounds, recipes, prayers, expectations, humour, coping mechanisms and ways of loving—and then life slowly asks us to decide what continues into the next room. Some things deserve a permanent place. Some need repairing. Some need understanding before they can be released. Others may have protected previous generations in circumstances that no longer exist and can finally be put down without disrespecting the people who once needed them.

This is where I have become gentler towards the generations before me. It is easy to look backwards with contemporary knowledge and decide what our parents or grandparents should have done differently, but that judgement can become unfair when we forget the worlds they were navigating. They made decisions using the resources, opportunities, information and emotional vocabulary available to them. Some were surviving circumstances we will never fully understand. Recognising what I want to change does not require me to turn the people who raised me into villains. We can acknowledge that something hurt us without concluding that everyone involved intended to cause harm.

There are things I understand differently now precisely because the people before me carried enough difficulty to give me the opportunity to think differently. That deserves gratitude. Perhaps progress within a family is supposed to look like that: one generation survives, another gains stability, another learns to communicate, another becomes brave enough to establish healthier boundaries, and perhaps the generation after that receives something lighter than what came before. Nobody completes the work alone.

This has also changed the way I understand forgiveness. Forgiveness does not require pretending every inherited pattern was harmless. Neither does gratitude require silence about what could have been better. We can hold two truths without forcing one to cancel the other: I was loved, and there were things I needed to unlearn. I am grateful, and there were things that hurt. My family gave me much of what is good in me, and I am still responsible for deciding what kind of person I become from here. Emotional maturity, perhaps, begins when we stop demanding that our histories be entirely good or entirely bad before we know what to do with them.

There is another reason this matters to me: patterns travel remarkably well through generations when nobody stops to examine them. A fear becomes a rule, the rule becomes a habit, the habit becomes a tradition, and eventually someone says, “That’s just how our family is,” as though repetition has transformed something into destiny. But repetition is not destiny. We are allowed to be the place where an old pattern finally meets a new decision. We may not be responsible for where every behaviour originated, but once we recognise it, we become responsible for what we do with that awareness.

That does not mean changing everything. Growing older has actually made me more appreciative of many things I was taught. I still believe in showing up for people. I still believe generosity matters, elders deserve respect, family should care for one another and faith should influence more than what happens inside a church. I still understand why food appears whenever somebody visits and why leaving someone’s house without being offered something to eat would feel almost culturally suspicious. Some inheritances are worth keeping precisely because the world would become poorer without them.

What I want to change is not the love beneath those values, but the places where love can become distorted by obligation, guilt, silence or fear. I want generosity without entitlement, respect without intimidation, family closeness without the disappearance of individuality, resilience without emotional suppression, faith without pretending difficult questions do not exist, and kindness that includes the person doing the giving. Perhaps growing differently does not always mean walking in the opposite direction from where we came. Sometimes it means continuing along the same road while carrying fewer unnecessary burdens.

The older I become, the less interested I am in proving that my way is better than the way I was raised. Every generation develops blind spots of its own, and I am certain there are things I currently believe with confidence that life may eventually humble me enough to reconsider. That thought makes me cautious about judging the past too severely. Growth is not standing above the people who raised us and announcing that we know better; it is standing on what they gave us and trying to see a little further.

Maybe that is what the son beside the river eventually understood. He did not need to hate the towels his father and grandfather had placed along the floor. Those towels had helped them through many storms. They represented resourcefulness, endurance and people doing the best they knew how to do. But gratitude for what once kept a family afloat did not mean the next generation had to spend every rainy season standing ankle-deep in the same water.

I think that is my answer to today’s prompt. What I do differently from how I was raised is not one particular habit; it is that I try to question what I carry before assuming I must carry it forever. I want to preserve the faith, generosity, humour, loyalty and sense of family that shaped me while becoming more deliberate about boundaries, communication, emotional honesty and personal responsibility. I want to inherit with gratitude rather than obedience to everything simply because it came first, because the most respectful thing we can sometimes do with what previous generations gave us is not to preserve it unchanged, but to build upon it.

Perhaps every family eventually needs someone willing to look at the water coming beneath the door and ask whether there might be another way. That person does not have to reject the people who came before them, nor pretend they were wrong about everything. They can honour the hands that once laid down the towels while still choosing to build something stronger for the next storm. We do not betray our roots by growing in a different direction. Roots were never meant to dictate the exact shape of every branch; they were meant to give the tree enough strength to keep growing. And maybe that is one of the quiet responsibilities of becoming an adult: to receive what was handed to us with gratitude, keep what still gives life, gently release what no longer does, and leave something a little wiser for whoever comes after us.