don't let your lived life become a protracted mourning

The other day, while waiting an hour or so down the road for a friend to arrive for a long-planned lunch date, I stole a few minutes with the February 25 issue of The New Yorker, which I had slipped into my oversized bag.

The magazine fell to page 77, Joan Acocella's story on Adam Phillips, called "This is Your Life." This first paragraph needs no Kephart intercessions. Just read it, and see if, on this day at least, it might save you. The photo above, by the way, is of Jeb Stuart Wood, whom I profiled in the Inquirer on Sunday. He's a foundry man at work here on a piece for the great sculptress Michele Oka Doner. Behind him are the old mobiles he restores when he finds time. Elsewhere are his own sculptures, suspended and waiting. I thought of Jeb often after my interview that day—of how broadly and peaceably he was living.

From The New Yorker:

Adam Phillips, Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer, dislikes the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential, and this is the subject of his new book, "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of the night, we do think this, and grieve that it isn't possible. "And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives," Phillips writes. "Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live."

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The Kindness Question

Last Thursday, two of the young stars of Dancesport came early to practice, and since I had my camera, I had the privilege of photographing them. I've seen them many times of course; they have terrific talent. But more than that, they are deeply good souls who look out, as partners, for one another.

When I mentioned to them both that I'd like to take their picture, the young girl responded with a warning: "We'll have a little argument first," she said, "about which dance we'd like to start with. And I'll say one thing and he'll say the other, and in the end, of course, he'll win." She laughed, he threw his arm around her, and so it was quite clear that there was no antipathy here, just friendship—just the way that things get started off between them, when they come to tango, waltz, or jive. Their kindness toward each other made me happier than I could say. It was part of the beauty that I snapped into my camera.

I was thinking about these two today as I read the New York Times Book Review commentary on a new Adam Phillips/Barbara Taylor book called "On Kindness." In his review, Peter Stevenson writes, quoting, in part, the authors:

The punch line of the book is that we are, each of us, battling back against our innate kindness, with which we are fairly bursting, at every turn. Why? Because “real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. . . . By involving us with strangers . . . as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.” By walling ourselves off from our inner kindness, we end up skulking around, hoarding scraps from the lost magical kindness of childhood, terrified that our hatred is stronger than our love.

I've not read the 114 pages of this book, only the review, but I'm intrigued. Kindness as innate? I hope. Kindness as danger? I can attest. Kindness as essential? Oh yes, absolutely. Kindness as something that children teach us? All the time, and every day.

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