One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish – how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”Read more...
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.
I mean for there to be no melodrama, and so I begin this post like this: I am practically fine. But for the past two weeks, I've been taking the sorts of tests one takes to prove or disprove fine.
I'm not dwelling on that. I'm dwelling on this: The world is gooded through. Yes, I'm watching the news. I'm worrying out loud. I grow impatient for solutions, too. I bump up across all varieties of raw, of wrong, of unjust, of incalcuable; I feel myself sink into trenches of despair. But I am rocked and rescued by the good that nonetheless prevails. By people who do their jobs well, and do them humanely (barium, they say, is like an extended pina colada; try to remember your first kiss, they say, when your anxiety seems to stop your blood from flowing). By friends who send funny and loving emails. By bloggers who couldn't even begin to know how valued they are. By a son sending all hieroglyphic form of the famed 160-character text message.
Not to mention a husband who stopped one day beneath the dogwood tree outside my office and noticed that the finch had supped on every last skinny black seed. He reached up and took the feeder down. He filled it with new seed. He stretched and slid the feeder back into place, like he was ornamenting a Christmas tree. He went on his way, then, my husband did. And the birds returned in force.
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