It is lovely to sit with you.
To see some folks I haven't seen in a while.
Welcome.
Welcome,
Shane.
Nice to see you.
Oh.
Hmm.
So I recently read A delightful book.
It was called Theo of Golden.
It's a fiction.
But it was lovely.
And one of the things that I took away from from this book was the idea.
Of doing.
Little,
Nameless,
Unremembered acts of kindness.
Little,
Nameless,
Unremembered acts of kindness.
Doing for others without needing anyone to notice.
Without expecting anything in return.
Just doing the next kind thing.
Kindness.
It doesn't always arrive like as some grand gesture.
And it doesn't necessarily require generosity.
On a large scale.
Kindness doesn't require a great deal of time.
Or it doesn't even really.
.
.
Particularly have a loving state of mind associated with it.
Sometimes kindness is as simple as staying in a conversation a little longer when we'd rather find a way to leave.
Offering our seat to someone on a bus.
Or in a waiting room.
Kindness can be letting another driver merge into traffic.
Listening without immediately preparing our response.
Kindness can be giving somebody the benefit of the doubt.
When it's so easy just to make a judgment.
Sometimes it's noticing that the person in front of us is struggling.
And allowing ourselves to be interrupted by their need.
And often.
And my preferred method is to do something helpful.
That nobody will ever know about.
No recognition,
No thank you.
No little story we get to tell later about what a good person we are.
Just in a moment.
We had the opportunity to make life a little better,
A little easier for someone else.
And we took it.
Here's an example.
That I really appreciate.
An elderly man wanted to plant his annual tomato garden.
But he was getting older and he was really sad that his son,
Vincent.
Who was in prison wasn't there to help him.
So he writes to his son in prison.
Dear Vincent,
I'm feeling pretty sad because I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year.
And it gives me such pleasure.
I'm just getting too old to dig up the tomato plot.
I know if you were here,
My troubles would be over.
I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me,
Like in the old days.
Love,
Papa.
A few days later,
He received a letter from his son.
Dear Pops,
Don't dig up the garden.
That's where the bodies are buried.
At 4 a.
M.
The next morning,
The FBI agents and the local police arrived and dug up the entire area and didn't find any bodies.
They apologized to the old man and left.
That same day,
He received another letter.
Dear Pop.
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now.
That was the best I could do under the circumstances.
So.
So we do what we can,
Right?
One of the things I appreciate about the practice of kindness is we don't have to wait for the right conditions.
The opportunities are already here.
They're in the grocery store,
In the conversations that we have with people we know well,
And people that we'll never see again.
And they're in the small moments when we have a choice.
We have a choice in how we respond.
And this is where the practice gets interesting.
Because we can have a genuine intention to be kind.
And then find ourselves in situations where kindness is suddenly inconvenient.
Like we're tired or we're in a hurry.
Or someone is telling us a story that we've already heard.
And we're preoccupied with our own problems,
And another person's needs feels like one more thing that's being asked of us.
So we feel this impulse to withdraw and we can.
.
.
Feel the small contraction of that in ourselves.
And we can recognize that small contraction as a moment of practice.
Can we stay present for another minute?
Can we recommit to listening a little bit more carefully and let this person in front of us have their moment without making it about me?
They aren't dramatic decisions.
Often nobody else would notice them.
I think that's partly the point.
We're not practicing kindness to create an identity for ourselves as a kind person.
We're practicing the movement of the heart towards connection rather than away from connection.
I want to bring in a poem by Rosemary Waltola Tromer that captures another side of this practice.
She writes,
When Sheldon,
Driving the car,
Turned to me as he parked and said,
I will open the door for you.
He must have sensed the no rising in me because then he said,
Please.
So I sat there,
Wrestling my resistance to receiving help.
And once again,
I felt inside me the stubborn two-year-old girl who told her mom,
Do it self.
But by the time the door opened,
The smile on this 56-year-old woman's face was real.
Lit up from within like a green light on a busy strip.
Radiant with an honest relief that in this often cruel and careless world,
Someone said through action,
It's my pleasure to be kind to you.
Hours later,
I still feel it.
The glow.
I love this poem because it reminds us that kindness doesn't always look the way we imagine it will.
We tend to think of kindness as something that we do for others.
We're the ones that often offer the help.
Making room and giving something away.
But what happens when we're the ones being offered kindness?
Can we receive it?
Or do we immediately say,
Oh,
No,
That's OK.
I can manage.
You don't need to help me.
We may be so accustomed to taking care of ourselves that accepting help actually feels uncomfortable.
And there's nothing wrong with being independent.
But sometimes our independence becomes a kind of armor.
We can be so busy managing on our own that we don't allow another person the simple pleasure of helping us.
Perhaps receiving kindness.
Is itself a kind of generous act.
It gives another person the opportunity to express what is good in them.
It allows us to participate in the simple human truth that we need each other.
This is a short story written by a surgeon.
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies,
Her face post-operative,
Her mouth twisted and palsy,
Clownish.
A tiny twig of the facial nerve.
The one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed.
She will be thus from now on.
The surgeon has followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh.
I promise you that.
Nevertheless,
To remove the tumor in her cheek,
I had to cut the little nerve.
Her young husband is in the room.
He stands on the opposite side of the bed,
And together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight,
Isolated from me,
Private.
Will my mouth always be like this?
She asks.
Yes,
I say,
It will.
It is because the nerve was cut.
She nods and is silent.
And the young man smiles.
I like it,
He says.
It's kind of cute.
All at once,
I know who he is.
I understand and I lower my gaze.
One is not bold.
In an encounter with a God.
Unmindful?
He bends to kiss her crooked mouth.
And I am so close,
I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers.
To show her that her kiss,
That their kiss still works.
So I'd like to offer a small experiment for the coming week.
Not a project to take on or another thing to accomplish.
Just an invitation.
To pay attention.
See if you can notice one opportunity each day.
To offer a small act of kindness.
It might be something you planned to do,
Or it might be something you hadn't considered until the opportunity appears.
You know,
It could be letting somebody go in line in front of you.
Or staying with the conversation.
Instead of looking for a way out.
And then notice what happens inside of you.
When you consider offering something,
Like is there an opening or is there resistance?
Do you feel generous or do you feel inconvenienced?
And then notice what happens afterwards.
Do you feel pleased?
Do you want somebody to notice?
Do you find yourself wondering whether it made a difference?
What I'm offering.
The invitation is the simplest practice of engaged Buddhism.
A topic that I would like to continue exploring with you.
Small,
Nameless,
Unremembered acts of kindness.
And perhaps they're unremembered because they're so ordinary.
You know,
We hold a door or listen to a story or offer a seat,
Just making room for someone else.
And then the moment passes and we go on with our day.
We may never know.
What that small act meant to another person,
And maybe we don't need to know.
So the next time you find yourself in an ordinary moment with an ordinary person,
And you have a choice about how to respond.
Perhaps you can offer a small act of kindness.
Just because you can.
Just because.
We're here together.
Sometimes the smallest thing we can do for one another are the very things that remind us.
That we belong to one another.
So I offer this.
For your consideration.
