I was kind before, too; I didn’t need a tragic experience to become kind. I’ve valued kindness and practiced showing it to others, growing in this practice slowly with time – beginning, perhaps, in first grade, when my class watched a devastating interpretation of Ray Bradbury’s All Summer In A Day, and advancing a bit in different relationships and different roles. I’m not always perfectly kind, of course, and I judge myself pretty harshly when I feel I’ve messed up (and now, I’m distressed to find that occasionally I’m physically unable to show kindness in the way I would like – Broca’s area actually shuts down during triggered moments and flashbacks). But I never quite understood just how important kindness was to those who are suffering. Now I’m learning.

“It is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes…”

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye

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.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

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.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.