It’s no secret that my favorite poet – by miles – is the inimitable Naomi Shihab Nye. Just as it’s no secret that my favorite poem by my favorite poet is Kindness.
I remember the first time I encountered it, in May of 2018. I was traveling by train from Irún to Barcelona. I had just left Lourdes the previous day, and I found myself in a continued meditative state imbued with a sense of wonder and meaning, and a sense of openness to what lay ahead on my journey.
Some days before, in Paris, a lady on a bench at Tour Saint-Jacques asked me what I would’ve told my younger self if I could give her advice. I mumbled something about working less; being kinder to people.
I was still shell-shocked and unclear, not yet knowing where to place myself in the world. I just had this vague notion of “Kindness” as a value, probably because of a quote I read which advised “In a world in which you could be anything, choose to be kind”.
And then, on that chilly southbound train on a Wednesday, I was gifted the following words:
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 gaze at 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.
It feels as if I’ve lived through various iterations of the poem since then. In hindsight, I think the line that changed me forever, was this one:
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.
We’re in a weird place in South Africa right now. There are riots and looting in some of our provinces. In some way it feels inevitable, as if it was this huge abscess that has been building and building since 1994, and now it has finally popped.
As a country we’ve always straddled the knifepoint between the exaltation of a peaceful, negotiated transfer of power, and the nagging suspicion that an earned power – perhaps hard earned through a revolution – might have produced a better outcome for some.
Now it’s as if there’s a relief mixed in with the chaos and the anxiety. It’s like the other shoe is finally dropping.
There’s an ambiguity in my feelings about it all. I’m anxious, of course. I have strict rules about not posting anything political on the internet. I have reservations about my rights to have any feelings about this, because 1. I’m aware of my position of privilege and 2, in no universe can I grasp the full extent of the other’s reality.
I get frustrated by those who pick a side and refuse to even entertain a different worldview. I’m frustrated by my own inability to pick a point of view and defend it, regardless.
I want to explain it away by the Mars/Venus Conjunction in whatever Sign is opposing whatever other Planet. I want to believe this is the beginning of the beginning and not the beginning of an end.
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.
I’m also aware of the problematic nature of Empathy, which often prioritises individuals over groups.
Yet I cannot accept that what we’re going through as a collective can ignore all the social issues we have, both as a society and as individuals living through a pandemic, and label it unilaterally as political shenanigans or criminality.
I found this post on Twitter this morning, which I think best describes the way I feel underneath all my own anxieties:
More than one thing can be true at any given time. More than one thing can also mean more than two things, or three.
Trying to oversimplify these issues in order to sweep it under the rug and arrive at cosmetic order, will never lead us to seeing how the other could also be you, how we all have dreams and plans, and how we all need kindness to accompany us everywhere, like a shadow and a friend.
Like Lebo Mashile, I wish you peace of mind and heart. I wish you health.
Daily Braveries 