(1) Kindness in an Unkind World
The new year is but a month and a half old, and already the news is much too full of death and destruction.
From abroad, we receive daily reports of the victims of Russia’s continuing drone attacks on Ukraine’s civilians, and for the past week we’ve been witnessing the massive devastation of the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6th, with constantly rising counts of the dead (over 36,000 so far) and of the injured (well over 100,000 so far), and countless more left homeless and without proper access to food and medical attention.
Here in the United States, as of February 10th, there have been sixty-five reported incidents of mass shootings, accounting for 98 persons killed and another 260 individuals injured. And we are still coming to grips with the issues raised by the unbearably brutal and fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by the Scorpion police team in Memphis in early January.
Surrounded by all this violence and destruction, some caused by nature but so much of it perpetrated by human beings, it causes me a fair amount of cognitive dissonance to report that I seem to be observing a noticeable uptick in everyday kindness. Perhaps you’ve seen this recent Starbucks ad; I’m usually skeptical of uplifting social messages from profit-seeking corporations, but in this case the advertising message seems to align with my anecdotal experience.
So what could be going on here? Are we being kinder to each other because of all the random violence, or even despite it? Is there some sort of inexplicable inverse relationship at work, whereby an increasingly unfriendly outer world sparks an increasing amount of friendliness within our inner worlds? Are we trying somehow to negate the external violence by practicing a form of internal nonviolence? In terms of the famous phrase, are we collectively attempting to “be the change we want to see in the world”?
If that’s the case, then in spite of our good intentions, we’ve got it all wrong. It should not be the case that more unfriendliness in the world at large is what’s needed to bring about more friendliness in our interpersonal relationships. On the contrary, what should happen is that more friendliness on the personal level leads to more friendliness in the collective community.
That would not seem to be what’s happening now. But could it?
Perhaps. But it would probably take more than just an uptick in random acts of kindness, and definitely more than an occasional feel-good commercial message from a corporation.
Echoing a well-known quote from the Dalai Llama, who is reported to have once declared “Kindness is my religion”, I think it will take a serious commitment on the part of a great many individuals to make kindness an integral feature of their every encounter and their every undertaking. Perhaps there could be a tipping point, where enough people have embraced kindness as a bedrock principle in their lives that it begins to go viral, throughout our culture and our politics.
I wonder - what kind of country, what kind of world, could we have then?
(2) Being Kind
I begin most of my days - weather permitting - with a 6:00am mile-long run along one of the main roads in town. At that time of morning, few cars are out, and only a few other runners and dog-walkers, so mostly I have the street to myself, and my solitary sprint serves as a calming prequel to the 20-minute sitting meditation I’ll enjoy upon returning home.
But every so often, as I’m jogging along, I arrive at an intersection at the exact moment when an early-morning driver pulls up to their stop sign. Almost always, they wait for me to pass, and I always acknowledge their courtesy with a smile and a wave of my hand. This simple gesture, when it happens, serves as my first opportunity for being kind that particular day.
When the driver acknowledges my wave with one of their own, it’s a particularly pleasant experience for me. And when they ignore it, it’s a useful reminder for me that an act of kindness should always be performed for its own sake, and not with any expectation of reciprocity.
Either way, the exchange is an added bonus to the good start my run has gotten my day off to.
Writing this issue’s opening essay got me to thinking a lot about being kind, and one thing that really strikes me is how, while acts of kindness are by their very definition performed for the benefit of others, they almost always result in equal if not greater benefit to ourselves.
There’s an important lesson here, I think - of particular significance in our consumerist culture that constantly calls out to us to pursue our own personal happiness by satisfying our own self-centered needs.
That lesson is already implicit in the Buddhist teachings about interconnectedness of all beings, and the contingent nature of reality. To understand the implications of these two interrelated phenomena is to know that the shallow pursuit of one’s own happiness leads merely to a tiny fleeting flicker of satisfaction, quickly extinguished and soon crying out to be lit again.
The way in which acts of kindness redound to the doer’s own sense of satisfaction points us to a much deeper possibility of pursuing happiness, a way that’s rooted in the recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness.
Being kind doesn’t have to be your religion, but it just might be the most rewarding way of living your life in this unkind world.
(3) Postscript
Interesting reading from the past few weeks:
This essay by David Loy, written nearly three years ago, explored the importance of “don’t-know mind” during those anxious months preceding the 2020 presidential election. It continues to be of great value for navigating our way through today’s turbulent times … “Buddhist teachings have always emphasized impermanence, and this year certainly offers us plenty of examples to demonstrate that truth. The instability of the world that most of us nonetheless took for granted has become more apparent and the future seems more unpredictable than ever. It’s not that we should want to return to the ‘old normal’, which was never that good for most people and certainly not for the biosphere. But it’s also looking doubtful that there will be anything like a ‘new normal’ in the foreseeable future. We may not know what happens after we cast our ballot in what could be the most important election in US history, but there is good reason to believe we’re in for a wild ride that will test the maturity of our practice. One Buddhist principle that is all the more relevant today is don’t-know mind—a teaching that calls attention to the ‘not knowing’ state of mind that various meditation practices cultivate, in which we let go of discursive thought. The practice of don’t-know mind applies this state of mind to everyday life, but it’s easy to misunderstand. It doesn’t imply willful ignorance about what is happening. Don’t-know mind is not an excuse to evade responsibility. Rather it involves letting go of our fixed ideas about the world, including our expectations.”
Continuing our exploration of the past, here is an essay from Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, written in the weeks immediately following the January 6th insurrection, on the need for continued collective effort to preserve our democracy … “I never expected to experience a direct assault on democracy in the United States, one of the oldest, most prosperous democracies in the world. But if there is any lesson we can draw from the past four years, it is that it can happen here. If we are to address the root causes of this insurrection, we have to understand, deep within ourselves, that we are human beings like other human beings on this planet, with the same flaws and the same ambitions and the same fragilities. There is nothing magical about our democracy that will rise up and save us. Building the democratic processes we cherish today took hard and dedicated work, and protecting them will take the hard and dedicated work of people who love this country.”
And finally, arriving back in the present, New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul warns us not to repeat our 2016 mistake of underestimating Donald Trump in our response to the potential 2024 candidacy of Ron DeSantis … “It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.
We’ve made that mistake before. It’s reliably depressing to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. We’ve already cataloged the mistakes in media coverage and dissected what we missed that somehow made Trump a viable, let alone a desirable, candidate to occupy the Oval Office. Let’s pay closer attention this time.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Look for the next issue in three weeks, posting on Wednesday, March 8th.
Tom, amazing. I was just pondering the same thought ... I concluded that the push toward self satisfaction has been a major negative for our culture and society. :(