Sunday, January 16, 2011

Kindness

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     "And if we are lucky, sometimes there is a friend or maybe a stranger offering a little bit of kindness.  Take it, smile at them, hold it, and pass it on.  Sometimes, a little bit is all we need."

     Hello, Happy New Year!!  I have been asking myself for a good way to begin the New Year on my blog and I decided on the topic of kindness.  There are many recurring themes that you will probably see in my writing.  Kindness is a major one. 
     
 The wonderful thing about kindness is that at the same time, it is both simple and yet profound.  Ever stand at the shore and throw a pebble into the water?  See how the ripples get bigger and bigger and wider and wider until the circumference of them becomes larger than what we can actually see?  This is how kindness works in the world.  And if you stay at the edge of the water, just a little longer, sometimes you see, one by one, the ripples returning to the spot where the pebble was cast.  That is kindness coming back, but this is not why we do it.  

     Whatever stories we have about our life, whatever our life experiences, I am certain, there is one which was difficult to go through.  I’m talking about the kind of experience that stops us in our tracks, changes things up, and makes us re-evaluate what we believed  before.  It happens at one point or another to all of us.  Although difficult, times like these can transform us as they can be an opportunity for growth and reflection.  Out of our own struggles, we learn kindness and compassion.  From the depth of our pain, we find the voice of tenderness within.  When we understand that everyone shares this, that no one is exempt from the ebb and flow of life, we know we are not alone.  Ultimately, from our own experience with suffering, we are motivated to reach out and ease the suffering of another.  

     It is not just in difficult times that this is important. Kindness creates a better world each day. We just don’t know how far one kind gesture will go. That’s pretty cool when you think about it... When we choose to act out of the common bond we share as humans, we realize that what we do for another we are really doing for the planet, for the children, for humanity.  I don’t think anything expresses this better than in the beautiful poem “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye.  
And if we are lucky, sometimes there is a friend or maybe a stranger offering a little bit of kindness.  Take it, smile at them, hold it, and pass it on. Sometimes, a little bit is all we need.

Peace,
Alyssa Sineni Truckenbrod


    Kindness
by 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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

—Naomi Shihab Nye from Words Under Words: Selected Poems