I'm getting older, married for the second time, owned four companies, moved all over the country and survived the sixties. I've seen a lot of life and known many people.
There are no newspaper reporters asking me (yet) what the secret of my longevity is, but if there were, I would sum it up in one word: kindness. I've learned that kindness given and received is a daily ingredient of life that takes the sting out and puts the smile on.
As you know if you have read this blog before, I recently came through a successful 12-hour surgery to remove a large, benign tumor from my brain base.
I learned long ago how precious kindness was, but that lesson came into focus at a whole new level when I was tethered to machines in ICU, drugged at all hours, interrupted throughout the night for needle sticks and instructions, and presented with totally inedible food every day.
Kindness made all the difference; it got me through.
So in thinking about that, I remembered a poem I found a long time ago about kindness and thought I would share it with you, maybe extend your patience and good intentions so we can all increase the kindness level in the world.
The author is not known.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose everything,
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 of the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white pancho
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 it ‘til 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 out of 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.
Mighty kindness. Mighty Alrightness.
- The Acolyte
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