#42: Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

This is hard to write and even harder to read. I write it specifically for a great friend who is facing the loss of a loved one. I do not even know if writing this down is the right thing to do. But I think it is and – you know what – he is the kindest man I know.

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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi talks of the event that wrote this poem for her. It is a typical circumstance for us all that we are just mooching along when – BANG! out of the blue, something happens, something dreadful, someone in this case is shot dead in front of her (the dead man in the poncho in the poem) and she is robbed of all possessions in a foreign country. Naomi was consoled by a local in a foreign language whose kindness transcended his foreignness.

How do we react? That is the question.

When we are most pressed by challenging circumstances, when we least feel like being kind, in fact, its opposite, despair, fear, dread, loneliness take hold, that is exactly when we are called most urgently to be kind, to be true to that compassionate part of our souls. Kindness cannot be conditional. And yet perhaps opportunities truly to be kind do not occur that often in our lives.

The more we reflect, the more likely we are to recall a kind response before it is too late. Poetry helps here, helps hugely. Helps, as Naomi says, to acknowledge that sorrow and kindness go hand in hand, that they equally enlighten us to the warp and the weft of the cloth of all sorrows. Perhaps sorrow and kindness ARE the texture of our lives, our lived lives, as we behave and show up and act:

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,

Those of us who in our lives have experienced ‘kindness raising its head/from the crowd of the world to say it is you I have been looking for,/and goes with you like a shadow or a friend’, those of us are blessed.  My friend to whom this writing is dedicated is one such person raising his head from the crowd who then accompanies me. There are a few others in my life and if they are reading this, they will know who they are. They are people who have reached out to me, given to me more than they were given to, listened attentively to me more than spoke, and embraced my soul in love.

That grief and heartache must happen, is the lesson. Let us all be ready for this in our lives and in those of our friends, our acquaintances, our strangers yet to meet in our lives. Of everyone. So that we recognize the truth that ‘only kindness makes sense anymore’.