Kindness

Dear friend,

Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, writes,

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

It makes me think of how perhaps some people haven't lost enough things that mean something to them.

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.

She continues:

How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Not everyone is capable of understanding the mechanism of kindness. May God protect people from frightening events in their lives but  sometimes, these very events mold you into a person with deep human understanding and perspective.

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.

I believe only someone who has experienced going round and round into the grind of real sorrow can know full-well what kindness is and can recognise the times when it is needed. Those who don't face hardships enough cannot know the depth of the roots of kindness. To them, it is an alien thing - intangible and something that cannot be accounted for. Kindness for them is a thing whose profits they can neither imagine nor weigh. So they deem it to be a worthless thing. I don't think anyone who forgets their hardships or the trials of their ancestors can understand kindness.

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.

But when all else fails, for someone who does or does not understand kindness...

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
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Your forever-friend in hardship,
T.

Note: This letter has been redacted from its original version.