Making Sense of Sorrow

Saturday before last, a wonder-friend sent me this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. So many times, as we navigated the crowds and listened to the children speak and watched little kids holding signs that said, “I don’t want to be next,”at the March For Our Lives, I felt overwhelmed by the magnitude and sorrow and was moved to tears. All these kids addressing their pain and privilege at once. I came home and read the poem again, reminded myself that these kids weren’t tied to the immobilizing “that’s just how things are” and were the most likely to be able to lead change as a result. They perhaps already know kindness as the only thing that makes sense.

Monday I printed it and brought it everywhere. We read it and discussed it, wrote to it. On Tuesday, a colleague I love (one can love colleagues, in fact it’s the best possible situation) said, “I need something to make sense of it.” I had just the thing. I read it to her, my phone tethered to the charger on the wall, and I listened to her laugh-cry at its perfection, at its perfect timing. On Wednesday I ran out of copies and thought I’d do something else anyway, but sure enough we needed this and half the participants asked me to email it to them. Last night I read it after dinner to my sons and one of our dearest friends, who had come home from a long trip, a bit battered, but steady with his big easy laugh, his comforting presence. We sat around the table after the plates had been cleared. This friend of ours knows sorrow, I know sorrow, but my sons don’t know sorrow. Not really. I hope they never do, but it is inevitable that they will. It is a fact of life, there is noting I can do. In fact, their sorrow may be my own doing. And it is a relief to trust that when know it, they may also wake into a deeper capacity for kindness. It has been helpful to be reminded that kindness is my only responsibility, and it will have to be enough, because most of the time I don’t have anything else.

How did you learn kindness/how are you learning kindness? I also like the construct of “before you can (blank) you must (blank)…” I’m thinking about the necessity of disillusionment for certain kinds of growth, individually and as a society. However you take it, follow the line of words for 20 minutes.

Here’s the poem.

Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.