Who Cares Besides Me, And That's The Point
Reflections on kindness in difficult times.
Lately I’ve been struggling to exercise kindness to the degree that I’d like. Even when it doesn’t reach the surface, I know in my heart I’m not being especially charitable to other people.
I suspect you know this feeling, of a period where you are not your best self to others. Unsurprisingly this one has coincided with maybe the busiest stretch of months I have ever experienced—it’s more difficult to be pleasant and thoughtful when you’re stressed to the max, when you’re worried one of the innumerable threads you’re holding might snap.
Of course in the midst of such feelings it is also easy to be unkind to one’s self. Even something as insignificant as not writing a newsletter last week turbocharged a whole set of feelings within me. Good ones—It’s nice to be able to take a break—and bad—How is it that you went a whole week without finding something worthwhile to say?
The issue, if I’m honest with myself, is not that I actually had nothing to say, but that my thoughts lacked focus, given the circumstances. I read a lot of newsletters that are about one thing in particular, music or poetry or cooking or what have you. This one is about nothing in particular, which means it could be about anything, which makes for a frankly overwhelming array of possibilities to choose from week to week.
As is so often the case I stumbled upon something that one of these newsletter writers had shared that helped me feel a whole lot better. This passage from Maria Popova, which introduces Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness,” was what did it:
If you have not watched yourself, helpless and horrified, transform into an ill-tempered child with a loved one or the unsuspecting man blocking the produce aisle with his basket…you have not lived. Discontinuous and self-contradictory even under the safest and sanest of circumstances, human beings are not wired for constancy of feeling, of conduct, of selfhood. When the world grows unsafe, when life charges at us with its stresses and its sorrows, our devotion to kindness can short-circuit with alarming ease. And yet, paradoxically, it is often in the laboratory of loss and uncertainty that we calibrate and supercharge our capacity for kindness.
I find I become most keenly attuned to the state of my inner being when I take my dog for a walk. She’s not even a year old yet, still a puppy despite already having reached her full size, and we’ve had her less than three months. On days when my mind is relatively settled and I’m coping with the world as I ought, I don’t even have to think about those two important facts—I can deal with her fits of stubbornness and our difficulties communicating our needs to each other with easy grace and good humor.
But that is certainly not every day. At moments when I’m really failing to cope with the small problems she presents me I start to view myself with something like detachment. Man, I am really not dealing with this well and Man, I am really fucking this up are two thoughts I have on a regular basis, as though I’m watching myself on tape and not experiencing the negative event in real time. In these moments my dog is the “unsuspecting man blocking the produce aisle with his basket,” and I am the frazzled and horrified adult-child.
Nye’s poem begins with a simple explanation for how we might learn from such moments.
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
If my semi-constant meditation on the fragile mortality of myself and everyone I have ever loved is good for anything, it’s the act of re-centering and re-prioritizing it allows me to do. Afterwards, if not in the moment itself, it allows me to ask: Was it worth it? Was it worth it to let that interminable and pointless Zoom meeting I just had become anger at my young, still-training dog for following her basic instincts? Was it worth it to let a contentious email thread turn into tears of frustration about the other members of my household making me late for something?
The answer is, invariably, no.
Nye reflects:
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
That’s what it’s all really about, isn’t it? Reflections on that fleeting life we share, the common bonds created by something as simple as our collective need to inhale and exhale. What’s that old expression? You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. Everyone else is journeying through the night with plans, too, and whether you consider your plans so much more important than theirs as to give in to road rage is what we call a “you problem.”
The good news about the common experience of being human (meaning the common experience of these frustrations) is that because we are all capable of feeling these feelings, we’re capable of banding together to help each other through them, too. Another of those talented newsletter writers I mentioned above, my friend Rachel, shares a newsletter with her partner which is ostensibly about cooking but ends up being full of life lessons. Last week, she wrote that
[w]e are tangled in the line together, harpoon-stuck and sea bloody. Most days we are Ahab’s exhausted crew, chasing money and glory for our overlords, but some days we experience great awe as a dark eye meets ours in the water. These moments can be guideposts in our lives, and an exhortation to create a new world where we can all swim. After all, our ship sinks if we don’t question the mad captain.
You have to make the space necessary for these kinds of connections to be possible. There can be no awe where there is no room to breathe, to think, to just be.
So why write a newsletter at all? Why add one more solo thing to a pile that can never fully be put away when it doesn’t pay, when it occasionally adds the kind of stress that makes being a kind and thoughtful person harder? Like with so many things, a poet came up with the closest thing to an answer that I can manage.
And that’s the point. Good enough for me! Guess I’ll keep going. Maybe you will, too.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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