The Trouble with Kindness

I was not expecting to have such difficulty with my 33 Acts of Kindness project.  Yet it is already April, and I find that I am struggling.

One challenge that I'm running into is that part of my agreement in doing this was to avoid repeating the same act in different situations.  That makes it particularly challenging.  I'll be in line at Starbucks on one of my days home with the little one, and think, Hey!  I know!  I'll buy the order for the person behind me... oh, crap.  I already did that one.

Do you see the irony here?  I'm NOT doing acts of kindness that I would otherwise do because I've done them already and they won't "count" toward my 33 for the year. 

Perhaps this is what happens when people are overly perfectionistic.

I have decided to revisit this entire project.  I will continue to do acts of kindness, even if it's the same one over and over again.  If something new occurs to me, I will do it.  This takes me to my second issue which, oddly enough, was the reason I imposed the "don't do the same thing twice" rule to begin with.

Being kind in new ways can be anxiety-provoking.

It's like being new at anything.  Whenever I attempt to do something that is outside of my comfort zone, it is exciting and frightening all at once.  Buying things for people is a very easy way for me to be kind.  Turning around at a church service to tell a young woman how inspiring and courageous I thought she was for leaving her native country due to the threat of persecution for her sexual orientation was much more challenging.  In a way, it can be fun to challenge myself to do things in a way that is not the norm, and to see what happens.  Often, I find that it opens doors that would have otherwise remained closed, or brings me closer to new people or opportunities that I might not have had exposure to otherwise. 

This activity, the 33 acts of kindness, is interesting.  It's bringing into focus some of the ways in which I sabotage myself and act in excessively self-limiting ways.  It's amusing to see where I get stuck, and amusing to see how I haven't seen it before.  It's also interesting and liberating to see what happens when I do things differently, and how tiny changes tend to have a ripple effect, creating a cascade of increasingly larger changes.  



 

Grieving and Gratitude

While I was out on maternity leave and home with my then-almost-a-month-old daughter, I decided to start listening to the stereo during the day.  This is something my mother always did while I was growing up.  Leaving the stereo on and one light whenever leaving the house, she always returned to a lighted, sound-filled home.  I don't know what her reasons were for this, but I assumed it had something to do with not wanting to come home to a dark, quiet house.  As I sat at home, nursing, changing diapers, sometimes cleaning the house, and sometimes eating lunch, the combination of our grandmother clock's steady tick-tock, and intermittent newborn cries could have induced a turn for the worse in my mental health.  Fighting this decline was critical, and so I started listening to the oldies station.  

I love music in general, and the oldies are no exception.  Much to my surprise, I've noticed the music of my childhood years edging its way onto the local stations, indicating that the tunes of the decadent eighties are now going the way of the dinosaurs.  It was noticing this, combined with decent pattern recognition skills and auditory recall, that led me to realize the local station was rotating a few playlists.  Tiring of being able to predict the next song to play, I decided to really shake things up and listen to NPR instead.

Although there is predictability to NPR, it didn't bother me because I knew I'd be listening to different topics each day.  I started to learn about politics as I changed diapers, and listened to people I've never heard of talk about their new books while I nursed.  

Then Sandy Hook happened.

It was one of those moments when I knew I'd remember where I was when I heard the news.  That day, I was eating lunch at my dining room table and my daughter was on the floor in her jungle animal play gym nearby when the news broke.  It was the first major tragedy to make news since my daughter had been born, and I had no preparation for the impact it had upon me.

I looked at my daughter.  I thought of my workplace friends.  The teachers filling in for me on leave.  My students.  In particular, I thought of an elementary school in which I work.  The principal, the office staff, the students with whom I work in the halls on travel skills.  The dedicated teachers who support them in their educational programming every day.  I thought of the people at Sandy Hook, desperately waiting for children, spouses, and friends to leave the school building.  I looked at my daughter again and finally understood why some people live in desperate, controlling fear, and cloak their children in it.

Oh, how I cried.

The photos started to go up online.  You know the ones I'm talking about.  Young children and the educators who lost their lives.  The person who carried the gun, and the person who brought him into the world.  I have never cried so much over the deaths of people I did not know.

I began this post intending to write something about safety versus independence, and how being able to live fully means being willing to accept a certain amount of risk, to deliberately exchange our attempts at keeping ourselves safe for the richness and joy that can be ours when we stretch beyond our habitual ways of behaving.  All of that is true.  Sandy Hook is a painful reminder that we cannot be certain that this moment won't be the last one, and of how limited our control is over what happens to us.  

We do have control, though, over the spirit in which we approach life.  After all, we only have our lives, our loved ones, our memories and values and dreams, for so long.

Let us be grateful for what we have while we are fortunate enough to still have it, and let us express that gratitude by living as fully as we can.