Kindness

 Is there anything more important than being kind?

When I’m dead and gone (and, for that matter, while I still live), I want, above all, to be seen as a person who treated others kindly.  Sure, I’d like to considered a creative genius, a spiritual inspiration, and a brutally-handsome heartthrob, but compared to being kind, those don’t matter at all (even if they were real possibilities.)

I’m always dismayed by rich and powerful (or, for that matter, poor and weak) people who enjoy being heartless and cruel.  What’s the point being rich and powerful (or, for that matter, poor and weak) if it means you have to be mean?  I know Machiavelli said that it’s better to be feared than loved, but that’s just for princes in the 16th century, and even then, I’ll bet, the kind prince (or princess) slept better than the cruel one.

Singer-songwriter, Nick Lowe, made the musical point that you’ve got to be cruel to be kind but be that as it may (or may not), the goal is still kindness.  Perhaps I do have to be just a little bit harsh from time to time in my aspiration to be compassionate, but surely, that’s just in small doses, not like all Simon LeGree or anything.

I realize that the danger of valorizing kindness so highly is that, as a parent, or educator, or citizen, I may sometimes emphasize mercy over justice; or I may make compassionate exceptions that undermine the principle of fairness; or I may simply be taken advantage of by those who care less about kindness than I do.

But, so be it; and if it means that I’m something of a failure as a parent, educator, or citizen, then perhaps it’s an opportunity to practice kindness to myself and allow for those failings.

Better to be Jackie Robinson than Ty Cobb; Thich Hnat Hanh than Genghis Khan; Ferdinand than those other bulls; me, I hope, than Mitch McConnell.

Ordinary

There are about nine billion people on the planet, so even if you’re one in a million, that means there are still at least nine thousand people just like you.  Or, as wise counsel counsels us, “You’re not special and no one cares.”

Of course, there are some people who are special: Greta Thunberg, Beyoncé, Julio Rodriguez, for instance, but, for the rest of us, we’re just the rest of us. 

This used to bother me and resulted in my inability to accept the truth of the matter.  I tended towards a kind of solipsistic perspective which put me at the center of all things.  If I didn’t exist, then nothing would; therefore, I had to be special—in fact, the most special of things in the entire Universe.

Now, however, I’m comfortable with my ordinariness; I’m glad that I’m just another random human being going about their day.  Granted, I’m a good deal more fortunate than many, but this doesn’t confer upon me any distinction; it just makes me one of many who ought to be grateful for what they have.

Perhaps surprisingly, accepting all that I’m not doesn’t make me less likely to act in ways that define me as an individual: I still try to be creative; I continue to have my “ways;” and I haven’t given up the pretension that what I do or don’t do matters in some way.  It’s just that I realize that I’m not the only one who’s just like this, and no doubt there are many others just like this who do it better than me.

I’m not even the special edition version of me, in other words.

But that’s cool, because it means that instead of having to be one in nine billion, I get to be one of nine billion.  Rather than having to stand out, I get to stand with.  I’m a member of the biggest team in the world: Team Ordinary.

And that’s special.

Nothing

What do you do when you have nothing to do?

You could meditate, of course.  Or medicate, for that matter.  Or, if you were 13 years old, something else that begins with “m” and ends with “ate.”  (“Micturate!”  Of course; that’s what you were thinking, right?)

Certainly, there’s no end of tasks you could undertake: cleaning, gardening, Bible study, re-organizing your sock drawer, learning Spanish, volunteering at the local food bank, writing letters to your Congresspersons, making potato salad, even taking the dog for a walk, and on and on.

But, naah.

As the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea reminds us, doing something requires first doing it halfway, and before that doing it a quarter-way, and before that, an eighth, etc., etc., so since there’s an infinite number of steps to finally accomplishing anything, that means we can never do so, so why begin at all?

Or, as the contemporary philosopher Homer Simpson put it, “Trying is the first step towards failure.”  Again, may as well, therefore, do nothing.

Unfortunately, doing nothing is doing something, so once again, we find ourselves faced with the original question posed at the beginning of this piece.

I suppose you could think.  But think about what?  Might as well try thinking about nothing and get yourself all tied up in the same loop all over again.

Eating seems to be the default.  If all else fails, make yourself a sandwich, or even better, stand over the sink shoveling food into your mouth harvested from leftover containers tucked in the back of the refrigerator.

The problem is: all of these endeavors are relatively short-lived and so you soon find yourself with nothing to do once more.  And since you, yourself, are relatively long-lived (at least in comparison to over-the-sink-eating), you’ll still have many a year with nothing to do for many a year.

Oh well, there’s always writing; so you could do that and eventually end up with something like this.

 

Lucky

 How in the world did I ever get to be so lucky?

How come I can ride my bike down the hill to Lake Washington, relax in the sun with a book and a beer, take a few swims, and then, catch a bus—for only a dollar, Senior fare!—back up the hill as my afternoon entertainment, when all over the world, even in our fair city, people are suffering all the time?

Why is it that my complaints merely include a favorite sports team losing three games in a row or that someone has underlined passages in a book that I’ve checked out from the university library at which I have unlimited borrowing privileges whereas millions and millions of my fellow human beings have far more pressing concerns, like where their next meal is coming from (if at all), and if they’ll be able to find a safe place to sleep?

Why have I been spared serious health challenges (so far, and let’s hope this doesn’t jinx it) even into my mid-sixties, when countless babies, children, and young adults have had to deal with life-threatening diseases and debilitating conditions all their lives?

I thank my lucky stars to be sure and try to live with gratitude and kindness, but it’s surely not fair.  I’ve done nothing, really, more crucial to my good fortune than being born in the right place to the right parents; I got lucky in the genetic lottery, that’s the main thing.

A simple reading of some spiritual perspectives might suggest that I did some things right in previous incarnations to have ended up where I did, but that just kicks the can down the road, doesn’t it?  How come I was lucky enough in those earlier lives to be able to improve my lot those times around?

It’s a mystery and/or perhaps just pure random chance; in any event, I open these arms to the Universe and offer my eternal gratitude.

Stats

Major League baseball players are judged according to their statistics.  A player who gets a hit three out of every ten times he comes to bat, for a .300 batting average is a star, while a player who only gets a hit ever two out of ten times, for a .200 average, is a bum—unless he’s a catcher and hits a fair number of home runs, in which case, he starts for the Mariners.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if those of us who don’t make our livings by wearing pajamas in public were likewise assessed on numerical scale like this?  Imagine the possibilities for self-understanding and interpersonal communication if we all had our performance in life made clearer with statistics that helped us to see more accurately who we are and to share that information with others.

So, for instance, politicians and other public figures might have a statistic for how often (or infrequently) they tell the truth.  It’s unlikely any of them would score a perfect 1.000, but falling below the proverbial “Mendoza line” (.200) would mark them as someone not to be trusted—(not that this would prevent them from being elected to the highest office in the land.)

Good fielders in professional baseball routinely have a fielding percentage about .990; this would be a reasonable standard to shoot for when it came to one’s statistic for being kind to strangers.  Nearly everyone occasionally makes an error, but anyone who isn’t close to perfect in this stat should probably be sent down so to speak.

The top sluggers in the game have an on-base plus slugging percentage of over 1.  Seems like a stat which combined the percentage of times a person tips well plus the percentage of instances in which an apology is called for that they say they’re sorry should yield a number over 1.0 for the best of us, as well.

Gives a whole new meaning to asking for someone’s number.

Things

There are so many things in the world: houses, tables, dishes, lovingly-built model cars, electric vehicles, watercolor and pen sketches, boots, journals written in almost daily, hubcaps, mirrors, public artworks, tanks, surface-to-air missiles, socks and underwear, bathing suits, and on and on and on and on.

Probably most of what’s most admirable about human beings is the things that we’ve made, especially works of art and devotional structures like churches, synagogues, and sports stadiums.  But it’s all too much, isn’t it?  

Every tangible item that human beings have created, from a washer to washing machine or a pencil point to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is the natural world converted to artifact.  All the wealth you see, whether riding your bike through the toniest neighborhood in your fair city or standing awestruck beneath that Sistine Chapel ceiling, is Mother Nature turned into money.

Remarkable to be sure, but it makes you want to just stop—and stop making anything ever again.

Another successful city dump run earlier this week, but that only scratches the surface of all that’s accumulated and doesn’t even begin to take on the hard choices like what to do with all the handmade stuff, the stuff that contains memories of your own and your loved one’s creative activities.  

Like what IS going be the fate of all those journals, birthday cards, and, for that matter, lovingly-built model cars?

If everyone stopped making things today, there would still be centuries of things remaining and while I seem to recall Elizabeth Kolbert writing that our entire civilization, in the strata of the geologic record, will, in hundreds of millions of years, be no thicker than a postage stamp, that’s still, in the next decade or two, on overwhelming amount of stuff to deal with and an even more daunting number of decisions to make.

So, I guess I’ll stick to the electronic written word: takes up no physical space and so easy to delete!

Appetite

The problem with having an appetite is that it needs to be filled.

Whether you’re hungry for food, sex, power, or even another vintage Pendleton Board shirt solid-patterned size medium, that hunger will drive you to eat, fuck, win, buy, or whatever until it’s satisfied.

And then, of course, as soon as it is satisfied, you won’t be satisfied anymore and the cycle will happen all over again.  Which is why you’re fatter, more dissipated, exhausted, and broke than ever before.

And why, as the Buddhists remind us, life is suffering, the cause of which is desire.

Now, supposedly, you can overcome this condition of suffering by eliminating desire through following the Noble Eightfold path.  But unless you’re Buddha himself, that probably won’t happen since somewhere along that path—like right around the first or second step on it—you’ll be distracted by something shiny and desirable and by right back where you started, albeit slightly older and more disillusioned than where you were when you started.

The reasonable response to this, I suppose, is simply to observe your behavior with equanimity and continue in the ongoing attempt to accept the inevitability of the human condition with grace and humor.  And maybe have one fewer shot glass full of cashews as a snack during the day.

You don’t want to deprive yourself, since that just leads to overindulgence.  But at the same time, indulging in every desire, in the name of eliminating the tendency to cling to whatever feels good doesn’t work either; nor is it an effective strategy for fitting into last season’s jeans or Pendleton Board shirt.

One thing’s for certain: there will come a time in all our lives when desire is eliminated.  The problem is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, it won’t really be a time in our lives, since death, as he said, isn’t an event in life.

When you’re dead, you won’t have desires, so presumably that means no suffering, either.  

Yum.

Commentary

Science has proven that the absolute best way to raise your blood pressure and increase the likelihood of getting ulcers is to read the “comments” section on your preferred internet news source.  Doing so will make your blood boil and make you wonder why people have to be so mean.

Didn’t Mom always say that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?

Of course, I’m essentially violating that maxim right here, so I guess I don’t really have a right to complain.  Because as soon as I do complain, I’m doing the very thing I’m complaining about!

I just wonder if it’s possible for people to be a little kinder.  Why do we have to lead with attacking another person’s viewpoint or even their choice to share their viewpoint at all?

It seems like we regularly define ourselves by what we don’t like.  By posting a nasty comment about something that upsets me, I get a better sense of who I am, and let others know that I’m a person to be reckoned with.  Good for me by being bad for you!

One of the more puzzling aspects of this phenomenon is that often the commentors are complaining about the provider of the article they’re commenting on, for instance, ranting about the editorial policies of the Washington Post on the Washington Post site.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply not read the Post?  Isn’t there something strange about blaming the publisher of an article that makes you mad?  Why not just not read the article?

Readers of this site (if there are any), face a similar dilemma.  However, it’s far easier to ignore the writings of someone who is so easy to ignore.  So, perhaps, I’m providing an important public service here by having a website that is so undersubscribed.  But publishing blog posts that no one reads, I’m showing people how not to read what they don’t need to.