The Value of Small Kindnesses

 

I’ve been thinking about the way, 

when you walk down a crowded aisle, 

people pull in their legs to let you by. 

Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, 

a leftover from the Bubonic plague. 

“Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, 

when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, 

someone else will help you pick them up. 

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. 

To smile at them and for them to smile back. 

For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. 

So far from tribe and fire. 

Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, 

these fleeting temples we make together when we say, 

“Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” 

“I like your hat.

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​Source: A poem by Danusha Laméris on the value of small kindnesses:

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The Once and Future King

 Author T.H. White on learning as a cure for sadness:

"The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

Source: The Once and Future King​

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Death: The Final Stage of Growth

A psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross once wrote on how beautiful people are made:

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

Source: Death: The Final Stage of Growth

#growth #people #stage #beautiful