society is the bucket

In both work and observing, I have learned something about kids. A lot of parents try to get their boys to go fight. Of the young ones that do, they tend to be shy. You get the ones who just swing the boffer swords around with no regard for life, but, mostly, they’re reserved. It’s adorable. I mean, they’re kids.

At which point this six-ish-year-old girl whips out her certificate from the axe throwing booth and says “Nah, I’m fine.”

"In my culture, death is not the end. it's more of a stepping off point. You reach out with both hands and Bast and Sekhmet, they lead you into a green veld where... you can run forever."

💓 💌

“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”

— Laura McBride, We Are Called to Rise

“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded… sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”

— George Saunders, Congratulations, by the way

— Jenny Slate, Little Weirds

“I’ve never told you this,” she said. “But there’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don’t know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There’s a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It’s significant.”“Because somebody has to take them in.”“Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world…You move out of your isolation and become universal.”

— Andre Dubus, “Out of the Snow”, Dancing After Hours

“When you stand before me and see me, what do you know about the pain inside me and what do I know about yours? And if I kneeled before you and cried and told you, what more would you know about me than hell, when someone tells you that it is hot and horrible? That’s why people should stand before each other as reverently, as pensively, as lovingly, as standing before the entrance to hell.” 

— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak

“I’d like to think this [happy ending] isn’t weakness or… evasion… but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.”

— Atonement (2007), dir. Joe Wright

— Harvey (1950), dir. Harry Koster

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?”

— Simone Weil, “School Studies”

“I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding–not even that–no. Just for your recognition of me in you.”

— Tennessee Williams, “Sweet Bird of Youth”

“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow. The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own. To say “going through the motions”—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of the effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always arise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work.”

— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“In Middlemarch love enables knowledge. Love is a kind of knowledge. If Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on her family. It’s love that makes him realize that two women without their savings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own sense of dishonor. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another’s lesson, one another’s duty.”

— Zadie Smith, “Middlemarch and Everybody”

“Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.”

— Susan Sontag, New Year’s Resolutions

— Vincent D’Onofrio (x)

“It was past time for us, with or without irony, to be more divine; if we can guess what God’s benevolence might be it is because we guess at benevolence in ourselves.”

— Clarice Lispector, “Mineirinho”

“Look what happens when the tongue / Cannot say to kindness, / “I will be your slave.” / The moon / Covers her face with both hands / And can’t bear / To look.”

— Hafiz, “Covers Her Face with Both Hands”

“I scream for kindness. Let there be kindness. There is bloody little and never at a high enough level.”

— Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters

“Outside, where the snow is turning to slush, I walk with my hand very gently round your shoulders. Not to harm anyone: simple enough, that hope seems an ambition vast enough to consume a lifetime.”

— Geoff Dyer, “Parting Shots”

— Hozier, from an interview with NPR

“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

“In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.”

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,you must travel where the Indian in a white poncholies dead by the side of the road.You must see how this could be you,how he too was someonewho journeyed through the night with plansand the simple breath that kept him alive.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

“Years ago I was on the midtown cross-town bus in NYC, in evening rush hour, in January, in the sleeting wind and rain.

Yeah, it sucked.

The bus moved at a crawl, and everyone on it seemed depressed. It would’ve been far faster to walk across town, but the weather was too godawful to bear. Everyone was definitely hating their life that day.

When we reached 10th Ave, the bus driver made a surprising announcement.

He said, “Ladies and Gentleman, we are now nearing the Hudson River. I’m going to ask you to do me a favor. When you get off the bus, I’m going to hold out my hand. As you walk past me, I want you to drop your troubles into the palm of my hand. I’ll take your troubles for you, and when I drive past the river, I’ll throw them in. The reason I want to do this is because you all seem like you’ve had a bad day, and I don’t want you taking all your worries and sorrows home to your friends and families now. Because they deserve better than that, don’t they? So you just leave your troubles here with me to dispose of, and you all go have a wonderful night, OK?”

The whole bus — the whole grumpy lot of us — broke into laughter. (Some of us, myself included, might have even shed a tear or two.) And one by one, as we filed off the bus, we dropped our troubles into the palm of this good man’s hand, and we stepped off the bus with smiles on our faces.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert, “Dear Ones - A Story”