kindness
“The simplest acts of kindness are far more powerful
than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
The other night at dinner I sat next to a dear friend I rarely get to see. For his 60thbirthday, Randy and his husband had taken over a small restaurant they love and were hosting a beautiful meal for about two dozen people. “No gifts,” the invitation had said, “just dinner with good friends.” The setting was elegant and intimate, one long table set with candles and flowers, dusk falling, wine glasses being filled as each guest was warmly welcomed, introduced, and drawn into conversation.
In the moments before dessert was served, I asked my friend about his hopes and dreams for his sixties. I expected he’d return to a theme common in our conversations over the years — his impossible work-life balance — and that turning sixty might be prompting him to spend fewer hours at the office and more in his garden. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d expressed a desire to slow down, to read more books, take more bike rides, travel to new places, or just to spend more time with his partner of thirty years.
Instead, he answered my question with a word, one he’d clearly given some thought to already. “Kindness,” he said. “I’d just like to be more kind.”
My friend is one of the most intuitive, compassionate human beings I know. A psychiatrist with a private practice, he’s also the medical director at a large detox facility and an expert in addiction and recovery. In addition, he’s served as the therapist at a number of local boarding schools and, for many years, spent a day each a week working with veterans at a nearby VA hospital. He’s devoted his career to being with people who are struggling, lost, in pain, listening not only with his mind but also with his heart. Kindness, it seems to me, is the quality that unites and informs everything he does.
And yet, when he envisions the years ahead, it is not more experiences or more achievements or more things or even more time my friend wishes to create space for, but more kindness. I looked around at the faces of those gathered at the table, everyone enjoying their dinner, the good company, the intangible yet precious gift of belonging and of feeling cherished, and realized my friend’s quiet kindness campaign had already begun.
In the days since Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain took their lives, I’ve found myself engaged in a number of conversations about despair. There is the anguish of the world at large, ever present, delivered to us daily in whatever dose we deem bearable. There is a president whose assaults on truth, democracy, and human dignity are not only horrifying to many but life-threatening. There are, always, heart-wrenching losses close to home — a friend’s son’s sudden death, another’s diagnosis, a loved one’s lost job. There’s the general level of rudeness and pettiness woven through the fabric of our own everyday doings — and the challenge of how to respond in the moment to the blaring horn at a stoplight, the flipped finger, the casually tossed F-bomb, the hate-filled bumper sticker, the town clerk who frowns and turns her back rather than extending her office hours for five more minutes. There is the dizzying sense of changing norms, the realization that cruel, inhumane language and behavior that would not have been tolerated in the recent past is now considered acceptable and is sometimes even applauded.
And then there is the unfathomable mystery of what it is to be a hurting human being engaged in a life-or-death battle with depression, shame, misery, and suicidal impulses. We wonder how lives that looked so very splendid from the outside could have felt utterly unbearable on the inside. And we think of those among us who are wrestling with their own private demons but who may also be isolated, broke, weary, without any financial security or social connections, let alone fame, fortune, and adoring fans to brighten the darkness. If the Kate Spades and the Anthony Bourdains of the world can’t go on, we might well ask, what hope is there for any normal person who’s feeling desperate and alone?
As I think about the people I love whose lives are shadowed by depression, anxiety, addiction, illness, or grief, I can’t help but wonder about all the others whose daily struggles are invisible to me. Surely I walk among them, oblivious. Surely I, and we as a culture, have a great deal of work to do. Shocking as these two very public suicides have been, they also serve as a reminder that too many others are suffering in anonymous silence. The stigmas of loneliness, need, and mental illness create dangerous, destructive barriers between us. A country in which 45,000 people a year commit suicide is a country that is deeply troubled.
Meanwhile, as a nation, we seem to be losing something essential and ineffable — our belief in basic decency as a part of the social contract. As Andrew Solomon observes in his necessary, profoundly wise essay about suffering and the preventable tragedy of suicide in the June 8 issue of The New Yorker:
On a national stage, we’ve seen an embrace of prejudice and intolerance, and that affects the mood of all citizens. My psychoanalyst said that he had never before had every one of his patients discuss national politics repeatedly, in session after session. Now there is a continuous strain of anxiety and fear from one side, and brutality from the other. Hatred is depressing — it is of course depressing to be hated, but it is also depressing to hate. The erosion of the social safety net means that more and more people are at a sudden breaking point, and there are few messages of authentic comfort to offer them in these pitiless times. One is done in by disease, by isolation and despair, and by life crisis. At the moment, many people’s vulnerability is exacerbated by the unkindness manifest in each day’s headlines. We feel both our own anguish and the world’s. There is a dearth of empathy, even of kindness, in the national conversation, and those deficits turn ordinary neurosis into actionable despair.”
Of course, coming upon these lines this morning, I thought right away of my friend’s birthday intention. I recall, too, something the Dalai Lama says quite often: “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
It does sound like such a simple thing, kindness. Almost too plain and obvious to warrant much reflection or discussion. And yet, the notion of kindness as a religion gives me a sense of direction after months of feeling a little lost. In so many ways, we are profoundly powerless. We can write another check, make another phone call to a politician’s answering machine, show up to vote. But we cannot make pain and suffering disappear. We can’t control the hurtful actions of others or silence the voices that threaten, humiliate, insult, or shame. We cannot solve the opioid crisis, keep the desperate family together at the border, slow the arctic melt, or prevent the disturbed teenager from killing his classmates. We can bring more kindness into the world. Sometimes, that is all we can do.
Kindness is about showing up, unbidden, and doing whatever there is to be done. Kindness requires us to listen, to be present, to stretch in ways that may be uncomfortable, unfamiliar, risky, new. Kindness asks that we give of ourselves, generously, and without thought of reward or repayment. And yet there are invisible dividends for even the simplest good deed, be it a smile offered, a hand extended, or a word of support given. Any act of kindness fortifies our connection with the person we have touched. Kindness, as our spiritual teachers remind us, is our true nature, our own untrammelled, always-available route to an inner sense of well-being. Being kind may not make us successful or rich or heroic, but being kind does make us a little happier and someone else’s day a little better — and really, that’s saying something. Kindness is our gift to one another, to the world, and to our own best selves.
Kindness is my soul daughter Lauren taking a day off to drive four hours north to Asheville to visit my son Jack, stopping along the way to fill her car with groceries for him. “No one ever did that for me,” she explained, “but I always thought how nice it would be.”
Kindness is my husband and his sister flying to Florida together this week to accompany their widowed sister to the hospital for a hip replacement, and to cook and clean and care for her when she gets home.
Kindness is my friend Maude, who pauses repeatedly as we walk together to clear branches away from the path, to carry a small orange salamander to safety, to pick up a piece of trash by the roadside, to compliment an elderly stranger’s well-behaved dog.
Kindness is my son Henry offering to spend a week of his summer supporting and caring for a beloved professor who’s recovering from open-heart surgery.
Kindness is my dad who, when he finishes mowing his own lawn, goes ahead and mows his neighbors’ lawns as well. It’s my mom, calling to say, “Stop in for dinner with us,” when we’re driving home from the airport and she knows my own refrigerator is empty.
Kindness is my neighbor Debbie, tucking yellow foxgloves into my garden to replace the ones that didn’t survive the winter.
Kindness is my friend Ann stuffing her pockets with one-dollar bills every time she goes to New York City, and then stopping to greet each street person she encounters with a smile and a friendly word. It is my friend Margaret, who built a website for the young flower farmers in her town, and then joined forces with a local shopkeeper to help them create a shop of their own. It is my friend Tracy, who invites everyone she knows to send a Valentine to her grandmother in a nursing home in California. It is the hundreds of people who read her Facebook post, buy a pretty card, and write a note to an elderly woman they do not know.
Kindness has a way of replicating itself, rippling outward, gathering energy as it goes, setting more and more kindness in motion, bringing a bit more peace and goodness into the world.
I know all this already. And yet, even so, there’s quite a difference between being nice when it suits me and actually dedicating myself to kindness. Henry James knew it, too. Which is no doubt why he took pains to make his own priorities so clear: “Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
It’s so tempting at times to respond to all that’s wrong in the world by allowing our hearts to harden, our kindness to atrophy, and our expectations of ourselves and others to shrink. But I’d rather go the other way. I want my heart to remain open, to soften, to grow. When I feel most vulnerable, I want to reach out and gently touch someone else’s tender place. When fear or sadness threaten to overtake me, I want to remember that kindness is a way forward. And when anger flares, I want to respond not with reactivity and defensiveness, but with patience and compassion.
In four months, I’ll turn sixty, too. Time, it turns out, is finite. And the truth of what really matters comes into sharper focus by the day. Watching the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School drama students performing “Seasons of Love” at Sunday night’s Tony Awards, I was surprised by the tears streaming down my face, only to realize that nearly everyone in the audience was weeping, too. I suspect our tears were as much about hope for our shared future as they were about sadness for the senseless tragedy that claimed the lives of these kids’ friends. In the face of unspeakable loss and senseless violence, these brave young people are choosing kindness and love, passion and presence, as their path toward healing. We can take a cue from them.
I wonder how my life might change if I were to commit myself anew each morning to just one simple thing: cultivating a kinder heart. How would the world change if each of us did the same? Could it be that the only appropriate, indeed the only humane, response to actionable despair is actionable kindness? And could it also be that our last, best hope for saving ourselves and our planet is to make kindness our religion, too, a religion that recognizes and confirms our inextricable interconnectedness, and that rejects any leader or dogma or doctrine that makes any human being feel separate, unsafe, or unworthy?
Suddenly, my own bucket list has become pretty short. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind.
Originally published at www.katrinakenison.com on June 13, 2018.
