Some Possibly Helpful Insights for Living in an Increasingly Terrifying World
Wisdom from George Saunders, Bryan Washington, Nicole Shawan Junior, Jesmyn Ward, and Martha Beck
Friends,
Things are bad right now in so many ways. We’re scared and exhausted and full of fury and anguish, and hope is hard to come by. Those of us with abusers in our lives, people we have fought against with every drop of our being, see abusers being celebrated for their outrageous, unfathomable cruelty on a national scale, and it’s triggering. Many of us see parallels to atrocities in the past and are frightened for what lies ahead.
I don’t know the way out of this, but I do know we need to hold each other close and not be divided by those who desperately seek to tear us apart.
I remember the first protest I attended in Washington, D.C., when I was eighteen: US out of El Salvador. For hours, tens of thousands of us marched through the streets toward the Capitol, over and again declaring: The people united will never be defeated!
I have attended countless protests since, with countless slogans, but none of them has resonated with my heart as deeply as that one. Probably because it’s true.
I am heartened by the people holding onto the good in this country. The people rising in kindness and determination and vision. What we are up against can feel insurmountable; they want us to feel that. But the web of justice and compassion and devotion that runs through our communities is potent and indestructible.
Don’t let them divide us.
*
I often scroll through the library of Beyond interviews I’ve been lucky enough to build, searching for wisdom, guidance, and insight on how to get through this world.
Today, I went in search of kindness. Of course, I found it. And a few other nuggets that, while not explicitly talking about kindness, are doing so implicitly.
Reading them both comforted and inspired me. It’s my hope they do the same for you.
xJane
The Person on the Other Side Is Just As Real as You Are
For me, [kindness is] the practice of trying to believe that the person on the other side is just as real as you are. You happen to be seeing things through these eyes. But theoretically, you could flip around and see them through the other person’s eyes, and it would be the same universe.
That has a lot of moral implications, but it also has aesthetic implications. Meaning that story is like a snow globe that you can walk around and go, “Oh, if I imagined these events from this point of view, it would look like this. If I change the perspective, it looks like that.” In the end, the holographic view of the story would be infused with total compassion because you’d know every angle and they would all seem completely reasonable.
— George Saunders [read George’s full interview]
Tenderness and Warmth in Community
I think that it's a challenge to find tenderness and warmth on a day-by-day basis, to say nothing of an hour-by-hour basis. Often, it's wildly dependent on your personal circumstances: your geography, your degree of ableness, your degree of marginalization. But insofar as I found tenderness and warmth, it has been largely in community, whether that's with one person or many people, in person or virtual. That’s what I keep coming back to: what are the many different forms that warmth and tenderness can take? And what are the many different forms that community can take? What are the things that people have to do to be okay? And what happens when that changes for them?
— Bryan Washington [read Bryan’s full interview]
Move Out What Doesn’t Belong to You
I'm able now to call something out and say, “Oh, that's white supremacy. That's their mental illness. That's capitalism. That's their mental illness.” And move that out of me. That has nothing to do with me. That's everything to do with them. I don't want to engage in that because that blocks my own abundance. I'm not advocating for silence. We should be loud about injustices. We should call out injustices. We should advocate to end injustices. But I'm not arguing with the folks who are committing the unjust acts.
— Of Monsters with Nicole Shawan Junior [read Nicole’s full interview]
Still This Light at the Center
It's always important for me when I write about the kind of people I write about, who could be members of my family or people from my community, that there's an element of hope there. There's still an element of joy. There's still this light at the center. Because when I think about my maternal grandmother, my dad, my mom, when I think even further back about my great grandparents and all the things that they lived through, without hope or without that presence of that light in their lives, whatever that meant for them, they wouldn't have survived what they survived. And they wouldn't have thrived in spite of whatever they survived.
— Jesmyn Ward [read Jesmyn’s full interview]
Kindness Is the Way Out
If I said to an anxious person, “Be calm,” there’s no way they could do that. They could pretend they were calm, but they could not be calm on command. But if I gave them a shivering, trembling, wet puppy that somebody tried to drown in a ditch and said, “Be kind,” then no matter how they were feeling, they would know how to be kind to the puppy, even if they felt frantic inside. Kindness is the way out. It’s the thing that stops the spin of the anxiety. Even if you do nothing more than learn to speak kindly to yourself in your own mind.
It makes me realize why the Dalai Lama says, “My religion is kindness.” I have a friend who goes to all his speeches, and she heard him say once, “It’s very rare that I can be completely kind for a whole day.” This is a man who literally does nothing else. He knows that the brain is set to spin and react to the circumstances of our lives, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, by getting into fretful places. And he knows that it is a commitment and a discipline to respond with kindness to the self. Don’t even bring in other people for a while. Just try responding to any stimulus around you by being as kind to yourself as you know how to be. Your life will change in such positive ways.
— Martha Beck [read Martha’s full interview]
These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
Remember what I told you
If you were of the world they would love you
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How are you getting through these days? What’s bringing you comfort? What’s grounding and steadying you? Possibly even bringing joy? Where are you finding support? What sort of support are you needing?
thank you for this "kindness" booster Jane. in december i was passing out the poem "Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris (https://poets.org/poem/small-kindnesses) to folks in meetings, at the grocery store, friends, wherever i ventured. a reminder more to me to remain kind wherever i plant my feet and heart. i even had a dream where a friend created post-it notes that said "all be kind." we don't know when an act of kindness can shift the tone of someone's day (our own?)...or at least let them know they matter.
i hope you are being offered an abundance of kindness today.
This is a much appreciated and beautiful share. Thank you, Jane, and the authors interviewed here. My heart breaks at what's happening in the US right now, and around the globe. It's terrifying. Music helps me. I've been listening to Hozier on repeat. He's such a gorgeous poet and human. Going for coffees with my kind and gentle father has been a balm. Meditation. I recently took a trip with my husband, to beautiful Lanzarote. We spent all of our time outdoors, in nature and by the ocean. Nature helps immensely. We took deep breaths by the sea. 💦💙