really tasted our bitter grief whenever we felt the loss of anything precious, beautiful, or hopeful, we might well become paralyzed. We might turn to stone, unable to move, speak, act, or do anything at all except weep, melt, grasp our aching hearts for the searing pain of feeling our hearts shred a dozen, a hundred times a day.
We are not taught to live like this, so awake, so attentive, so purposeful. We are taught instead to move faster, to strive, grasp, hurry, claim, protect, defend, accomplish, accumulate, and then keep count of all the things that still belong to us. That is, until the moment we learn in the most painfully insulting way that nothing, no thing or person or relationship or fortune, will ever belong to us. It is all on loan.
But rather than face and acknowledge our constant stream of losses, we choose instead the other thing we do when we lose things: We go faster. We speed up our lives, move so much faster, so the thousands of tiny losses dissolve into an unrecognizable blur under the speeding train of our important work. Or, as if a flat stone skipped across a pond, we hope to somehow make it to the other shore without getting wet, without sinking, without descending into the watery depths of inevitable heartache.
“There is more to life,” said Gandhi, “than increasing its speed.” We take refuge in speed, we avoid the searing burning in the heart by chasing swiftly this way and that, we become a moving target, so it is more difficult for those unbearable feelings to find us. Besides, we impress and satisfy others, get more done. But of course we are never quite done. So we refrain from rest, refuse even to pause.
But here is the rub. Love, kindness, generosity, companionship, joy, delight, happiness—these are all beautiful, precious gifts and blessings that grow in the very same soil from which we harvest sorrow, pain, loss, and heartbreak. The greater our heart’s capacity for joy, the more we will learn to truly bear our sorrows.
Here is the final thing we must know. We carry within us a fierce grace that will not be extinguished, does not break, cannot ever leave us comfortless. It lives in us. This life force, whatever it is that allows a blade of grass to push up, up through concrete to reach for sun and warmth, this lives in us, this is what we are made of. If we trust in this impossibly resilient capacity to bear all we are given, and recalibrate our speed in such a way that we allow ourselves to feel the searing burning loss of something or someone precious, then we can stand passionately and honestly before one another and offer our most deeply impossibly suffering heart’s fearless, honest, loving kindness. And it is from this shared kindness, born of our own sorrow and loss, that we find, with and for one another, in shared, loving companionship, some tender budding fragrance of enough.
Naomi Shihab Nye, the Palestinian-American poet, revealshow our most deeply authentic kindness and compassion must first be seeded in the ground of heart-shattering loss:
KINDNESS
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
We are not taught to live like this, so awake, so attentive, so purposeful. We are taught instead to move faster, to strive, grasp, hurry, claim, protect, defend, accomplish, accumulate, and then keep count of all the things that still belong to us. That is, until the moment we learn in the most painfully insulting way that nothing, no thing or person or relationship or fortune, will ever belong to us. It is all on loan.
But rather than face and acknowledge our constant stream of losses, we choose instead the other thing we do when we lose things: We go faster. We speed up our lives, move so much faster, so the thousands of tiny losses dissolve into an unrecognizable blur under the speeding train of our important work. Or, as if a flat stone skipped across a pond, we hope to somehow make it to the other shore without getting wet, without sinking, without descending into the watery depths of inevitable heartache.
“There is more to life,” said Gandhi, “than increasing its speed.” We take refuge in speed, we avoid the searing burning in the heart by chasing swiftly this way and that, we become a moving target, so it is more difficult for those unbearable feelings to find us. Besides, we impress and satisfy others, get more done. But of course we are never quite done. So we refrain from rest, refuse even to pause.
But here is the rub. Love, kindness, generosity, companionship, joy, delight, happiness—these are all beautiful, precious gifts and blessings that grow in the very same soil from which we harvest sorrow, pain, loss, and heartbreak. The greater our heart’s capacity for joy, the more we will learn to truly bear our sorrows.
Here is the final thing we must know. We carry within us a fierce grace that will not be extinguished, does not break, cannot ever leave us comfortless. It lives in us. This life force, whatever it is that allows a blade of grass to push up, up through concrete to reach for sun and warmth, this lives in us, this is what we are made of. If we trust in this impossibly resilient capacity to bear all we are given, and recalibrate our speed in such a way that we allow ourselves to feel the searing burning loss of something or someone precious, then we can stand passionately and honestly before one another and offer our most deeply impossibly suffering heart’s fearless, honest, loving kindness. And it is from this shared kindness, born of our own sorrow and loss, that we find, with and for one another, in shared, loving companionship, some tender budding fragrance of enough.
Naomi Shihab Nye, the Palestinian-American poet, revealshow our most deeply authentic kindness and compassion must first be seeded in the ground of heart-shattering loss:
KINDNESS
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
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