The Odds of Kindness

and the importance of community

I experience a bit of culture shock whenever I return to London. Many of the things people warned me about weren’t too bad: the sun shines more often than expected, and the rain normally doesn’t last too long. But still, I have a hard time getting used to the shell city-dwellers place around themselves. It was kind of relieving at first, as I’ve always been introverted. I hated small talk. I dreaded the awkward smile I’d have to give neighbors on the sidewalk as I passed them, and whenever I was in the Lush store at the mall, I darted around and hid from the employees. I was glad that, here, no one bothered me or asked me about the weather at the bus stop. Slowly, I succummed to the isolation. The shell made life easy, but I felt the effects of passive living. The city was just a backdrop.

bells hooks talks about the human need for community in All About Love:

Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear — against alienation and separation. The choose to love is a choice to connect — to find ourselves in the other.

It’s true that much of my self-isolation has been a product of fear. I wanted to preserve my sense of self, resist comparison and avoid situations that could embarrass or hurt me. Looking back, I didn’t have much of a “self” to preserve. It was putting a lock on a near-empty cabinet. There was no risk of breakage, but nothing entered, either. Nothing could grow. Eventually, the lock rusted and fell off, and I was forced to participate. I had long and difficult conversations. I worked on my patience. To my surprise, I started to feel more secure than I did with the lock on. I could lean in a little more, trust a little extra. It was community that sustained me through the most lonely periods of recent times, when physical quarantine and self-preservation kept us from interacting with one another. Even in such stillness, life blossomed. I felt in conversation with the world.

When I was in Switzerland, I fell into the habit of saying Bonjour! whenever I passed someone on my walks. It’s a softer acknowledgement than the way Americans do it, a simple recognition of mutual existence. One evening I sat by the fishing dock and watched the sunset, the pale yellow light reflecting on the water. I felt at peace for the first time in a while. I noticed a woman going for a swim a bit further down. As she walked past me to leave, she greeted me quietly and said C’est magnifique, no? I said yes. Despite the fact that the sun rises and sets every day, everywhere, it really was quite magnificent. To know that someone else thought so too was a reassurance that this beauty was happening outside my head. There’s a sweet Peanuts strip in which Linus tears his blanket and shares it with Charlie Brown, while exclaiming: “Happiness should be shared!” As much as I appreciate my sacred solo moments with the world, there is a deep purposeful beauty in allowing them to bleed past the boundaries of the self. There is so much to learn, so many ways to grow.

by Peng Wu

I wrote a newsletter a year ago about this same topic, and I want to revisit the featured poem, “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Lameris:

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

As I was first navigating the city, I recognised my role as an observer. I hyperfocused on the joy of the things that happened to me. One year on, I am questioning that role. How can I transform my observations into action? It’s so easy to slip back into the shell of individualism. It feels safer. Cities are dangerous these days. I feel bombarded by stories of random acts of violence, or attempts at them. Gun violence in the U.S. is at an all time high. I feel apprehensive walking home at night. How are we supposed to build community when we don’t know who to trust?

I wish I knew the answer, but I don’t think there is one. Rather, there is proof of possibility, in the small kindnesses. I recently moved to a new neighborhood, completely across town from the community that made the transition into city living so easy: my neighbors, the French woman at the bakery, the booksellers at my favorite bookshop. It was once again bell hooks who said that “enjoying the benefits of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend them the gift of openness and recognition”. My first year in London showed me that, in a city known for being cold and concrete, there are still pockets of softness. Maybe there are more than I will ever know.

On Monday, amongst my exhaustion from travelling, I accidentally left my backpack behind on a train from Gatwick Airport. Several strangers jumped into action. Two helped guide me to the station manager. Three employees of the station made phone calls to other stations on the route. They told me success stories to make me feel better. The entire time I was convinced someone must have taken it — it had all my valuables. But finally, the backpack was recovered at a station half an hour away — a passenger had found it and turned it in. When I got there, I was surprised to find that everything remained in its place. On the train back from the recovery site, I cried with relief — not only because I had found my backpack, but because someone else had found it. I was faced with a truth, the validity of which we are always searching for: the odds lean towards kindness.

Ross Gay writes in The Book of Delights:

I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and its always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.

---

I am not perfect. I still have a long way to go. Sometimes I am impatient, or in a rush, or tired, and have my sight is focused inward. But other times, when the sky of my mind is clear, I see something or someone and feel a tug to care. It is a human instinct. To listen to that tug is our life’s work.

Thank you for all the support on Devotions 2.0. I am feeling very lucky lately.

Love always,

<3

Tara

P.S. My first published poem is out in the Twitter journal the likety split. You can read it here. :-)