I read this poem recently and have been thinking about it ever since. It was tragically sad yet beautifully comforting. Was it true? Three aching stanzas later, I agreed. Do my sorrows count for more now?
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 sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at 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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
But what does it take for someone to see themselves in the Indian1 with the white poncho?* This projection assumes the depths of our sorrow, our oceanic trenches, connect to others. Do they? Can they? The thing about loss is its loneliness. It convinces you that you walk this path alone; the first, the only. Everyone lives in the mirage while you live in the desert. It doesn’t matter that its still all the Sahara. Or that your footprints are actually fossils.
I’ve often worried that instead of seeing ourselves in another’s anguish, we use it to cushion our fall. Well, at least I’m not them. Or we prop ourselves higher. They’re them for a reason. Or we look but don’t see. Not their eyes. And without them, we can’t look back to see ourselves. A mirror image.
But maybe Nye is right and this is just the last traversal. Our connectedness is an answer to a still nebulous question. Is it a “how” or a “why” or a “where”? I’ve always searched for the purpose behind my sorrows, my grief. As for kindness, I’ve seen her head bobbing in the crowd, and I think we are indeed friends.
or a Palestinian. Of note, Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, born to a Palestinian refugee father who survived the 1948 Nakba.
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This isn't a direct response to the questions raised, just thoughts that emerged through reading.
It is my experience that only through truly being with the flailing, failing, devastating reality of my own human experience could I access a level of kindness that I then allow that human experience in other people. Before then I had less empathy, graciousness, space for others' sorrow or imperfection because I was so busy trying to maintain perfection in myself.