4,000 Steps to Kindness

This post marks the 4,000^th entry since I began this Blog twelve years ago. That’s a lot of writing! And for what? 

 

Mostly from some inside need to both fully experience this life, with all its glory and difficulty, and to reflect on that experience, to give it a shape and meaning. In my private journals, it's mostly letters to future selves trying to remember what happened and how I felt about it. With the Blog, it’s a public sharing in the hope that there are some universals hidden amongst the particulars that resonate with others. 

 

Whether re-reading old journals or old Blogposts, it’s clear that the same issues and ideas and challenges and successes keep circulating around like the painted ponies on the carousel of time. Doesn’t matter which one you get on or when, the ride is pretty much the same, changed only by who else is riding with you and how the rider (me) might feel things just a bit differently. 

 

Though so much stays the same, we notice different things as we age or give more attention to the things we’ve always noticed. Lately, the word kindness has a new resonance for me— and the culture at large. Driving to the airport this morning to pick up the grandkids, I passed a billboard with Dolly Parton reminding us: KINDNESS- PASS IT ON. There are little posters I stumble on in social media that say things like: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” There is the Dali Lama’s well-known quote: “My religion is kindness.” There’s my new favorite poetry anthology The Paths to Kindness  (edited by James Crews), which includes Naomi Shihab Nye’s powerful poem Kindness. And on this Sufi holiday commemorating the poet Rumi’s reunion with the Divine Beloved, there is this excerpt of a poem above. 

 

Then there is my name—Good-kin. A lifelong invitation to be a good relative in the family and the unspoken invitation to make that family larger and larger, far beyond my blood relatives. (My Aunt Flo chose the name Goodkind and that is yet more explicit, that name probably changed at Ellis Island when my grandfather emigrated from Belaruse back at the turn of the century). That daily reminder to be both good and kind and a good kin to all.

 

Truth be told, this was rarely consciously on my mind as I improvised my way through this life trying to figure out who I am and what I have to offer. Just followed my nose, had a great time making music with people of all ages and began to notice is was a lot more fun for all of us if I was nice to them and appreciative, empathetic to both their glories and struggles. But certainly in the last 12 years of this Blog, each report of what the day brought to me and what I brought to the day in some ways was another step down the path of kindness, in all its simplicity and complexity. Perhaps, at the end of it all, it is as Ms. Nye suggests in the poem mentioned above:

 

“…  it is only kindness that makes sense anymore…

Only kindness that raises it 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.”

 

So on the occasion of this 4,000^th Blogpost, I believe she’s right. What this traveling music teacher is confessing to is the power and beauty of kindness. It is kindness I pack in my suitcases with each trip far out into the world, that I put in my pocket in my local jaunts, that I keep by my side here at the desk as I write. 

 

May it be forever so.