Act in Kindness

On my birthday this year, I started writing a letter to God. It's been one year since I launched this blog, and my life has been in turmoil. Still, there are moments of joy. But also deep pain and confusion.  ~~ Dear God,  What should I do? How can I become better? How can my writing let me be true to you? I was going to write, "How can my writing let me be true to myself?" But being true to myself might not be what I need. Being true to you is far deeper. Should I move back to Providence? Should I get that little apartment in the Arcade and rebuild? Or be in New York? Elsewhere? Can I break away from my past selfishness and give myself to love fully? Can I do something different with my life now? Can I give more to the world? Will it be through writing or through something else? I don’t know. What should I do? Right now isn’t working. Right now is broken. I’m obsessing. About my workouts, my clothes, how I look, my food ...

This summer, I've been doing a lot of reading, writing, and reflecting. I've been going through some major life changes - change which will continue to take a long time to emotionally metabolize. In the midst of this, my reading list has included Buber, Kierkegaard, and some classic Buddhist texts. One concept that has helped me is from the writer Stephen Batchelor. It's the notion that, in cultivating compassion and kindness, an individual still feels the full range of other emotions - positive, negative, and ambiguous. As he puts it: “A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.” This is my - our - challenge. First, recognize the emotion that is happening, as close as possible to when it is occurring. Name it. Feel it fully. And then let it flow out, without acting on it...

When is the last time you truly approached someone else in the same way you approach yourself? Can you accept that, much like we see within ourselves, others are also experiencing: Varieties of contradictory emotions and reactions... ... potentially crippling anxiety and depression... ...deep woundings of the soul by cause of sin or transgressions... ...or just a bad day here or there, for no reason at all. None of us will perfectly approach other people as fellow travels, equal "I"s. But we can start by being more aware. What are others asking of us, and what are we asking of them? Where is there an imbalance, and how can that be righted? Our relations to others are nothing more, nothing less, than a sharing of minds, bodies, emotions. I've learned that subtle shifts in tone and expression can throw all of these aspects out of whack. We can shatter each other. We can shatter ourselves. But we can also try again to approach others as the "I"s that ...

Last week, I found myself sitting in a fancy boardroom in midtown Manhattan. A group of about twenty well-dressed white men and two women were meeting with me to discuss matters of corporate strategy, for the nonprofit healthcare system I am consulting with. As we talked through anticipated state budget cuts to Medicaid and the difficulty of serving that program, I gazed out the window from time to time. Thirty-five stories below us, we could find the people who would be impacted by these decisions. Sure, this was only one nonprofit healthcare system among many. But collectively, we represented the decision makers, and others had to live by our decisions. There was no Medicaid recipient who would speak up for the program; there was no elderly person living in one of the organization's nursing homes would lend their perspective; there was no person from a homeless shelter who could say what they needed, what would help their situation most. It was seven o'clock in the eveni...

Do you ever pause from an act of creation and think, what's the point of this? Someone has already written a better poem or essay or blog post. Others have painted better portraits or crafted better knickknacks or knit better scarves. I can get a dress on Amazon for less money than I will spend on the fabric, and the craftmanship will be better too. Why create? I think this all the time. The logical conclusion is not an optimistic one: why do anything, because it's all been done before, and better, by others? In particular, to our point here, all the writing on kindness and love has been written and rewritten and translated and adapted for every age, every people. We have Moses. We have the Buddha. We have Jesus Christ. We have modern writers and gurus and leaders of all kinds. The teachings are there, sitting on our dusty shelves or buried deep in our subconscious. Have we listened? Have we truly understood these teachings from these great saints and le...

As I was sitting at a busy lunch spot in Manhattan yesterday, I overheard many different snippets of conversations. Themes included: "I can't believe that so-and-so did this..." "It really sucks to work there because..." "If only [insert almost anything here] were different, then [insert future happy outcome here]." I listened with curiosity, and considered the contrapositive of these statements. Here is an abbreviated list, which I am titling "Things that you'll never hear spoken aloud because people will never say them." Usually people won't even think these statements - at most, these could be a dark glimmer on the horizon of understanding. My boss won't trust me, which is why I don't know the answer to that question.  In my relationship, problems are due mostly to me.  I'm not just wrong, I probably am ignorant of the history / context of the underlying issue.  I could greatly improve my life if I got up off my...