What an excellent piece of writing, Matt. So thoughtfully constructed. The weed metaphor is perfect. And your kindness is signposting our little corner of encouragement is hugely appreciated 🙏
We have reached Budapest, Matt. Another night here then we are in a run of sleeper trains … Bucharest, Istanbul and Izmir. Planning to top up our inner history ‘files’ with a trip to Ephesus.
Using Charlotte’s Web as an example is spot on when you write: “her kindness is simply the expression of her recognition of his worth.” This feels so easily recognized and offers a pauseable moment to reflect. Almost with the same child, wide-eyed awareness.
I’ll repeat the crux of your position, “Kindness requires me to dig deeper, to examine the assumptions I make …” This is not a radical new way of thinking but instead something so obvious that it has gone undetected, unpracticed in the day-to-day. Why the hostility, but maybe because inside we have grown hard and unbending. Maybe more light touch will break the barriers and boundaries both internal and external.
Stacy, this is a topic that has been gnawing at me for some time. How did we get to this point where it seems so challenging? Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
It is challenging but more than that troubling because we (generic usage) are filled with a lot of mistrust. I spend a lot of time talking about community, trying to build community with a reminder that at some point those folks that are around will be needed but too often it feels like blank stares, non-committal actions, or forced obligation. Kindness is part of this - sitting at the table with the community dinner and hearing the stories of past, relating them to the present, understanding each of us has a value. Or, if the thought is that a few/some/all don't have worth then a reminder to self that they too might be viewed as having no value. I wish there was a glimmer of light ...
Thank you for this lovely piece of writing ! It is a beautiful reminder to focus on the essence of life. Kindness is the glue that holds us together, that unexpected smile, that unexpected kind comment. The Dalai Lama's words " Our prime purpose in this world is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." are my guiding light. Those small acts of kindness are the special moments and memories that accompany us through life. And ...I love the reminder that everyone is fighting their own battles. I believe that everyone is trying to live life the very best way they can. Often their past experiences present them with many more challenges to do so. Keeping in mind that perhaps I am not "right" in terms of my own views, values and lifestyle, helps me to remain open to people who are totally different to me. Different is not equal to "wrong".
Heike, thank you for reading and sharing your ideas. I know that I have been guilty of assuming my opinions are "right". This is a tough mental challenge for me at times. That interior work is often the hardest and I must learn to realize that everyone else is going through similar stuff. Extending grace to myself and others is a great first step towards kindness.
The giving tree and charlottes web two of my favorite books, first book that brought me to tears as a child charlottes web too. Beautiful piece thank you Matt I’m a kindness nerd also. Often kindness is overrated or written off as some sort of peculiar anomaly not worthy of practicing or to even notice. Downplayed as if displaying or having such qualities do not even measure up. Everything has its opposites so I’ll always be on the side of kindness over the opposites any day. Some to seem to have an inert diversion to it also which I also find most interesting indeed also. I’m actually very comfortable not measuring up to other people’s standards or lack there of.
Dear Matthew, Thank you for this amazing piece. I will be re-reading and pondering it in the coming days and weeks. I have been intending to write a piece on empathy and will definitely refer to it when I do. I will also re-stack it. I especially appreciate the distinction between "easy" kindness and "hard" kindness -- and the way you were able to call us cultivate "hard" kindness by confronting our assumptions about people not like ourselves. In a time of toxic social media and political rhetoric, it does fall back on us as individuals to counteract those more easily taken paths. I was having a conversation with a friend recently in which she was expressing frustration at not feeling she was making a sufficient difference to make significant change. But your essay highlights the way that step by step, interaction by interaction, person by person, the world can be changed.
Thanks for reading Hal and for your insightful comment. It seems to me that with the proliferation of so many "self-help" books and gurus, society has been led to think that if I follow "5 Easy Steps!" we will magically be a new person. The reality is it takes work, especially interior work. If we can each do our little part then yes, the world can be changed.
Incredible, Matthew. Thank you🙏 There is so much here that I am leaning into right now in my life.
You have left me thinking about many things… one idea is the sacredness and authenticity of our actions. How resonance and presence is felt, received and reflected when something is done from a place of deep love.
Many thanks Charlene. I appreciate you as always. I am in the same boat, and this is a special time in my life where I can lean into these ideas and really explore how they flesh out in my life. So much of how we interact with the world begins with how we interact with ourselves.
Matthew, do you know of the book 'The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse'? Its author is Charlie Mackesy, who is also an artist. It's about friendship but also very much about love and kindness. The themes of your wonderful, beautifully expressed post find agency in this poetic book, through both words and stunning artwork. A book for everyone, it would sit beautifully next to those classics 'The Giving Tree' and 'Charlotte's Web.'
Fundamentally, kindness is, as you point out, about attentive listening, about allowing another's voice to be heard, giving time that can slow down the day, practicing generosity by "seeing" the other person and, of course, loving oneself. Technology tends to obviate all of that; it produces too much noise, too much need to have the last word, too little time to take time for another. There is some recognition that our use of technology is contributing to our loss of attributes such as kindness, and some recognition that it's up to us to recover them.
In the book I mention, the animals befriend the boy, who needs help getting home. There is a lot of talk along the way, lessons contemplated and learned. At one point, the mole claims to have "discovered something better than cake." A conversation ensues about just what is "better than cake" until the horse, bearer of infinite wisdom, responds, "Nothing but kindness. It sits quietly beyond all things."
Lovely essay, Matthew. This stood out for me: "They remind me that everyone I encounter is fighting battles I know nothing about, carrying burdens I can't see, trying to make sense of circumstances that might overwhelm me if I faced them myself." It's such an important point, but so hard to always remember. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Thanks Kate. I always appreciate and value your insights. You got to the core of this one - the invisible interior life. We spend so much time with our own thoughts yet often forget that others are doing the same. If I can imagine the person next to me going through similar interior battles as I am going through then my mindset shifts. I want to be there for that person the same way I want someone to be there for me.
Beautifully written, Matthew. We're on the same page here, unsurprisingly. Serendipitously, I just started reading Charlotte's Web with my kids. It's such a perfect book.
Thanks Tiffany. Yes, it is a core memory book for me, fundamental to my world view. It seems odd to say that about a children's book but it has certainly had an outsized impact on me. Perhaps because I experienced it with my parents and then observed them imitate its lessons in their lives.
Matthew, if you’ve offered us finer writing so far in your later, literary career, I’d hope for someone to point me to it, because this is exceptional, a centerpiece for that first collection of essays whenever the time comes you think you’re ready to put it together. Beyond the art and craft of it and the vivid, natural imagery and metaphor, you philosophize from nature, even theologize, in one of the finer American traditions. If you don’t tell me that you labored some time on it but rather knocked it off just this week, I will audibly scream with unbecoming envy.
I feel a bit abashed to be mentioned in the essay, since I’m writing these days in a notably different tenor, more in outrage at the unkindness of others to others than in kindness. You address that, too, though your focus is elsewhere. To work with your controlling metaphor (speaking, you understand, from my deep knowledge of Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn concrete formulations) sometimes soil can be mismanaged and depleted of its nutrients, sometimes the land can be ravaged by fire, and these all call for different responses. Yet someone who knows the land better than I do – someone like you, to start – knows how even after the earth has sustained its most devastating assaults, ultimately new life will begin to break through the cracks toward the sun. Those cracks are kindness, starting, as you remind us so thoughtfully and eloquently, from one person to another.
Jay, your kind words always leave an impact. In this case I am truly encouraged by your first paragraph above and hopeful that my efforts will continue to evolve and mature into writing that will impact others. The actual writing of this essay took me a couple of weeks but the ideas had been germinating within for a long time.
Despite our different methods of approaching the topic, I think we both desire a similar end state. Interestingly enough, this line of thinking about fire is a fascinating one. I read recently about naturally occurring forest fires and why the lack of them is a real issue in conservation. Some seeds required for regrowth only burst open under the intense heat of fire. Fires also clear out the detritus and allow new growth to occur. But in the last 100 years we (humans, us silly creatures), thinking we know best, have thwarted natural fires. This has left us with a dysfunctional ecosystem. I believe that our interior selves are much like nature. It needs to be cultivated, good things allowed to grow, bad things weeded out, etc... But just as importantly, some natural process need to be allowed to play out. There will be times of abundance in our lives and times of drought. There are also times when we need to burn away the clutter of undergrowth that is preventing the new seeds from reaching maturity. We have to let the fire rage within at times to get to that place of clarity on the other side. I think the place that we must interject our human wisdom is how we allow the fire to come out of us. That is the critical juncture between the interior work and the exterior action.
Matthew, thanks for deterring my scream of envy! Yes, we do desire a similar end state. And I agree that the fire metaphor is a fascinating one. I’m familiar with that controversy over letting naturally occurring fires burn or not, though I’m educated by your information about the seeds that require the intense of heat of fire to burst open. That’s fascinating, too. The compelling analogy you draw here recalls to mind an exchange between two characters in my play What We Were Thinking Of that I recently serialized at Homo Vitruvius. Arguing about the Gulf War, one character uses the human analogy of saving a drowning person to argue over the U.S. intervention against Iraq to overturn its invasion of Kuwait. The other character offers the common objection a political scientist might offer to such an analogy that political conditions are different and much more complex than the moral dimensions of a purely personal dilemma (complex enough!). I confess I sometimes offer such analogies and believe they can be valid. But the caution is legitimate. In this case, we may have fire in the natural world, absent human life abutting or integrated into it, and the same with human life present. The human cost in the first instance is zero, in the latter it can be any number of human habitations, lives, and wealth lost.
The purifying fire is central to revolutionary ideation – burn the rotten house down and start all over again. But it’s very much the same in reactionary ideation, though that gets less attention in this regard. In that thinking, some better, previous world has been corrupted by developments over time – so much so that it all needs to be burned to the ground to recover what was lost. But what was lost, better or not, is lost, and there’s no going back in this world. The revolutionary’s refiner’s fire presumes that all that came before was worthless and all that will come after the destruction will justify the human cost of it.
I think we have more than a century’s evidence that both are wrong. That isn’t, to my mind, an argument for the cherished ideal (for some) of “political moderation” (sometimes valuable, indeed), which doesn’t allow for bold action or clarity of conception and purpose. But bold action and burning everything to the ground aren’t the same thing, and one element of wisdom is in being able to distinguish between the two. You write, “I think the place that we must interject our human wisdom is how we allow the fire to come out of us.” I agree completely.
Many thanks Mary. I so appreciate your presence here. It was a long, and at times, trying summer for me as I worked through a lot of stuff. But I am looking for to writing more pieces along these lines in the future. Maybe I will feel up to getting back on the schedule for Inner Life at some point if you are still interested in having me.
What an excellent piece of writing, Matt. So thoughtfully constructed. The weed metaphor is perfect. And your kindness is signposting our little corner of encouragement is hugely appreciated 🙏
Thank you my friend. I hope that your adventure is going well. I am loving all the photos.
We have reached Budapest, Matt. Another night here then we are in a run of sleeper trains … Bucharest, Istanbul and Izmir. Planning to top up our inner history ‘files’ with a trip to Ephesus.
Thank you. Kindness matters. ✌🏻
Many thanks Faith.
Using Charlotte’s Web as an example is spot on when you write: “her kindness is simply the expression of her recognition of his worth.” This feels so easily recognized and offers a pauseable moment to reflect. Almost with the same child, wide-eyed awareness.
I’ll repeat the crux of your position, “Kindness requires me to dig deeper, to examine the assumptions I make …” This is not a radical new way of thinking but instead something so obvious that it has gone undetected, unpracticed in the day-to-day. Why the hostility, but maybe because inside we have grown hard and unbending. Maybe more light touch will break the barriers and boundaries both internal and external.
Often the most courageous and heroic too
Stacy, this is a topic that has been gnawing at me for some time. How did we get to this point where it seems so challenging? Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
It is challenging but more than that troubling because we (generic usage) are filled with a lot of mistrust. I spend a lot of time talking about community, trying to build community with a reminder that at some point those folks that are around will be needed but too often it feels like blank stares, non-committal actions, or forced obligation. Kindness is part of this - sitting at the table with the community dinner and hearing the stories of past, relating them to the present, understanding each of us has a value. Or, if the thought is that a few/some/all don't have worth then a reminder to self that they too might be viewed as having no value. I wish there was a glimmer of light ...
Thank you for this lovely piece of writing ! It is a beautiful reminder to focus on the essence of life. Kindness is the glue that holds us together, that unexpected smile, that unexpected kind comment. The Dalai Lama's words " Our prime purpose in this world is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." are my guiding light. Those small acts of kindness are the special moments and memories that accompany us through life. And ...I love the reminder that everyone is fighting their own battles. I believe that everyone is trying to live life the very best way they can. Often their past experiences present them with many more challenges to do so. Keeping in mind that perhaps I am not "right" in terms of my own views, values and lifestyle, helps me to remain open to people who are totally different to me. Different is not equal to "wrong".
Thank you for spreading kindness !
Heike, thank you for reading and sharing your ideas. I know that I have been guilty of assuming my opinions are "right". This is a tough mental challenge for me at times. That interior work is often the hardest and I must learn to realize that everyone else is going through similar stuff. Extending grace to myself and others is a great first step towards kindness.
The giving tree and charlottes web two of my favorite books, first book that brought me to tears as a child charlottes web too. Beautiful piece thank you Matt I’m a kindness nerd also. Often kindness is overrated or written off as some sort of peculiar anomaly not worthy of practicing or to even notice. Downplayed as if displaying or having such qualities do not even measure up. Everything has its opposites so I’ll always be on the side of kindness over the opposites any day. Some to seem to have an inert diversion to it also which I also find most interesting indeed also. I’m actually very comfortable not measuring up to other people’s standards or lack there of.
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. It means a lot to me. Thanks for being a fellow kindness nerd! We have to spread the message.
Some people do seem
Dear Matthew, Thank you for this amazing piece. I will be re-reading and pondering it in the coming days and weeks. I have been intending to write a piece on empathy and will definitely refer to it when I do. I will also re-stack it. I especially appreciate the distinction between "easy" kindness and "hard" kindness -- and the way you were able to call us cultivate "hard" kindness by confronting our assumptions about people not like ourselves. In a time of toxic social media and political rhetoric, it does fall back on us as individuals to counteract those more easily taken paths. I was having a conversation with a friend recently in which she was expressing frustration at not feeling she was making a sufficient difference to make significant change. But your essay highlights the way that step by step, interaction by interaction, person by person, the world can be changed.
Thanks for reading Hal and for your insightful comment. It seems to me that with the proliferation of so many "self-help" books and gurus, society has been led to think that if I follow "5 Easy Steps!" we will magically be a new person. The reality is it takes work, especially interior work. If we can each do our little part then yes, the world can be changed.
Incredible, Matthew. Thank you🙏 There is so much here that I am leaning into right now in my life.
You have left me thinking about many things… one idea is the sacredness and authenticity of our actions. How resonance and presence is felt, received and reflected when something is done from a place of deep love.
Nicely put My sentiments as well.
Many thanks Charlene. I appreciate you as always. I am in the same boat, and this is a special time in my life where I can lean into these ideas and really explore how they flesh out in my life. So much of how we interact with the world begins with how we interact with ourselves.
Matthew, do you know of the book 'The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse'? Its author is Charlie Mackesy, who is also an artist. It's about friendship but also very much about love and kindness. The themes of your wonderful, beautifully expressed post find agency in this poetic book, through both words and stunning artwork. A book for everyone, it would sit beautifully next to those classics 'The Giving Tree' and 'Charlotte's Web.'
Fundamentally, kindness is, as you point out, about attentive listening, about allowing another's voice to be heard, giving time that can slow down the day, practicing generosity by "seeing" the other person and, of course, loving oneself. Technology tends to obviate all of that; it produces too much noise, too much need to have the last word, too little time to take time for another. There is some recognition that our use of technology is contributing to our loss of attributes such as kindness, and some recognition that it's up to us to recover them.
In the book I mention, the animals befriend the boy, who needs help getting home. There is a lot of talk along the way, lessons contemplated and learned. At one point, the mole claims to have "discovered something better than cake." A conversation ensues about just what is "better than cake" until the horse, bearer of infinite wisdom, responds, "Nothing but kindness. It sits quietly beyond all things."
It’s a GREAT book Maureen! And masterfully inserted into this thread and way of thinking based on Matthew’s premise. 🙏🏼
I am unfamiliar with this book but will be checking it out. Thank you.
You hit the nail on the head Matt, great piece.
Thanks Kody. I appreciate you taking the time to read. It means a lot to me.
Lovely essay, Matthew. This stood out for me: "They remind me that everyone I encounter is fighting battles I know nothing about, carrying burdens I can't see, trying to make sense of circumstances that might overwhelm me if I faced them myself." It's such an important point, but so hard to always remember. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Thanks Kate. I always appreciate and value your insights. You got to the core of this one - the invisible interior life. We spend so much time with our own thoughts yet often forget that others are doing the same. If I can imagine the person next to me going through similar interior battles as I am going through then my mindset shifts. I want to be there for that person the same way I want someone to be there for me.
Beautifully written, Matthew. We're on the same page here, unsurprisingly. Serendipitously, I just started reading Charlotte's Web with my kids. It's such a perfect book.
Thanks Tiffany. Yes, it is a core memory book for me, fundamental to my world view. It seems odd to say that about a children's book but it has certainly had an outsized impact on me. Perhaps because I experienced it with my parents and then observed them imitate its lessons in their lives.
Matthew, if you’ve offered us finer writing so far in your later, literary career, I’d hope for someone to point me to it, because this is exceptional, a centerpiece for that first collection of essays whenever the time comes you think you’re ready to put it together. Beyond the art and craft of it and the vivid, natural imagery and metaphor, you philosophize from nature, even theologize, in one of the finer American traditions. If you don’t tell me that you labored some time on it but rather knocked it off just this week, I will audibly scream with unbecoming envy.
I feel a bit abashed to be mentioned in the essay, since I’m writing these days in a notably different tenor, more in outrage at the unkindness of others to others than in kindness. You address that, too, though your focus is elsewhere. To work with your controlling metaphor (speaking, you understand, from my deep knowledge of Queens, Manhattan, and Brooklyn concrete formulations) sometimes soil can be mismanaged and depleted of its nutrients, sometimes the land can be ravaged by fire, and these all call for different responses. Yet someone who knows the land better than I do – someone like you, to start – knows how even after the earth has sustained its most devastating assaults, ultimately new life will begin to break through the cracks toward the sun. Those cracks are kindness, starting, as you remind us so thoughtfully and eloquently, from one person to another.
Jay, your kind words always leave an impact. In this case I am truly encouraged by your first paragraph above and hopeful that my efforts will continue to evolve and mature into writing that will impact others. The actual writing of this essay took me a couple of weeks but the ideas had been germinating within for a long time.
Despite our different methods of approaching the topic, I think we both desire a similar end state. Interestingly enough, this line of thinking about fire is a fascinating one. I read recently about naturally occurring forest fires and why the lack of them is a real issue in conservation. Some seeds required for regrowth only burst open under the intense heat of fire. Fires also clear out the detritus and allow new growth to occur. But in the last 100 years we (humans, us silly creatures), thinking we know best, have thwarted natural fires. This has left us with a dysfunctional ecosystem. I believe that our interior selves are much like nature. It needs to be cultivated, good things allowed to grow, bad things weeded out, etc... But just as importantly, some natural process need to be allowed to play out. There will be times of abundance in our lives and times of drought. There are also times when we need to burn away the clutter of undergrowth that is preventing the new seeds from reaching maturity. We have to let the fire rage within at times to get to that place of clarity on the other side. I think the place that we must interject our human wisdom is how we allow the fire to come out of us. That is the critical juncture between the interior work and the exterior action.
Matthew, thanks for deterring my scream of envy! Yes, we do desire a similar end state. And I agree that the fire metaphor is a fascinating one. I’m familiar with that controversy over letting naturally occurring fires burn or not, though I’m educated by your information about the seeds that require the intense of heat of fire to burst open. That’s fascinating, too. The compelling analogy you draw here recalls to mind an exchange between two characters in my play What We Were Thinking Of that I recently serialized at Homo Vitruvius. Arguing about the Gulf War, one character uses the human analogy of saving a drowning person to argue over the U.S. intervention against Iraq to overturn its invasion of Kuwait. The other character offers the common objection a political scientist might offer to such an analogy that political conditions are different and much more complex than the moral dimensions of a purely personal dilemma (complex enough!). I confess I sometimes offer such analogies and believe they can be valid. But the caution is legitimate. In this case, we may have fire in the natural world, absent human life abutting or integrated into it, and the same with human life present. The human cost in the first instance is zero, in the latter it can be any number of human habitations, lives, and wealth lost.
The purifying fire is central to revolutionary ideation – burn the rotten house down and start all over again. But it’s very much the same in reactionary ideation, though that gets less attention in this regard. In that thinking, some better, previous world has been corrupted by developments over time – so much so that it all needs to be burned to the ground to recover what was lost. But what was lost, better or not, is lost, and there’s no going back in this world. The revolutionary’s refiner’s fire presumes that all that came before was worthless and all that will come after the destruction will justify the human cost of it.
I think we have more than a century’s evidence that both are wrong. That isn’t, to my mind, an argument for the cherished ideal (for some) of “political moderation” (sometimes valuable, indeed), which doesn’t allow for bold action or clarity of conception and purpose. But bold action and burning everything to the ground aren’t the same thing, and one element of wisdom is in being able to distinguish between the two. You write, “I think the place that we must interject our human wisdom is how we allow the fire to come out of us.” I agree completely.
Kindness, dignity and attention explored here, Matthew, so eloquently. A beauty of an essay in these troubled times.
Many thanks Mary. I so appreciate your presence here. It was a long, and at times, trying summer for me as I worked through a lot of stuff. But I am looking for to writing more pieces along these lines in the future. Maybe I will feel up to getting back on the schedule for Inner Life at some point if you are still interested in having me.
Best thing I read on the Internet today. Thank you.
Many thanks Brian. I appreciate your being here.
Matthew, what a beautiful use of metaphor to anchor this piece. Your vision of kindness has rooted itself in my heart.
Thank you Rona. That means a great deal to me. I hope that you are well.