60 Orbits

Thoughts on the kindness of human survival

You would hope, by your 60th orbit, that you might have some useful life lessons to impart, at least to those younger.

I still can’t spell. I wish my skin still fits. I’m not so thrilled about this loss of face, although having had two melanomas excised I’m also grateful for every line I impress upon myself merely from fulsome gesticulation and self- expression.

But I have learned a thing or two about kindness that I can share.

For you may have a highly refined, superbly articulated, even theorised framework of ethics that literally looks impressive on paper (or screen).

You might even imbue a presence of purity and integrity.

You may make frequent declarations from your manifesto and sport bumper stickers about your random acts of kindness.

But those things may not amount to very much when life throws you curved balls and the day-to-day becomes practically unmanageable and insurmountable.

It is within those inflexion points, those vertiginous ruptures of illness or loss that the most deciding crossroads take form beneath your feet.

You will likely take the easier path even if it amounts to a betrayal of your ethical fibre, because the pleasure centres of your brain are screaming depletion and you can’t continue without solace and comfort, so much so that you begin to mistake the forms they take.

You will likely become your worst self, one you never envisaged becoming.

You will likely disappoint the faith your nearest and dearest placed in you.

OR

if you are one of those immortals, like Mandela befriending his prison guard, you will draw on reserves you didn’t know were in your possession to listen to the faint whispers from your higher self.

You will take the path into the rubble, and when it becomes impassable, learn to sit and wait for it to clear. (and yes, using rubble as a metaphor right at this time may bespeak the privilege of having all your social and emotional infrastructure still intact)

What is your North Star in these harshest of times?

It is kindness. It is being in service not to yourself and your own suffering, but to others.

If you are Mandela-like and you can muster such formidable strength you will rise and join the bucket brigade of those clearing the rubble by handing stones one to another along the line of kindness, gaining strength from each pass.

For kindness is our human purpose. We are here to look out for each other. Kindness is indiscriminate. It is universal. It applies to all and we all possess its expansive, rebuilding capacities. It does not alteration find in the face of geopolitical thieving or from its intergenerational trauma.

It is the only arsenal we can draw upon against the extraction, greed and disparity, unbridled and sadistic vengeance, category-thinking, polarity and conflation we are sinking deeper into.

I did not learn this from reading a room full of books. From that immersion I learnt firstly about misogyny, which I have lived, and then about colonial racism, which I haven’t - except as a beneficiary.

I learned about kindness from taking the easier path, from being unkind and thereafter inscribed with the indelible intaglio of regret. And from mothering in straightened circumstances. And from my three sisters and the exhausting care they take of our precious Mum. And from my brave, tenacious daughters. And from Paul, who has been known to take homeless people to brunch, to sit on the pavement with them, hear their life story and give them a hug and twenty quid. I so cherish being with a connected and kindhearted man who nutures me.

Being kind to one another draws our focus away from resentment and entitlement, this pervasive and ugly sense of being victimised by those most marginalised, the cynical and opportunistic lie of oligarchs enriching themselves by fomenting the conviction that precious things are being taken away from us by those who have the least.

We know from how communities draw together in ever frequenting crises that kindness rekindles connection, and delineates the lines of recognition in one another, of our vulnerability, resilience and empathy - you are as human as I, and I see that most acutely and vividly in your need for my help.

Kindness and the kind of open-heartedness and open-mindness it instills is the only arsenal we possess to find our way to a world of peace.