Smiling at Strangers - How One Introvert Discovered the Power of Being Kind

The Love Connection

Fear and hatred will cease to exist
when love is in abundance.
—Ken Nwadike Jr

The Wounded Heart

In 1976, two decades into my marriage to Richard, we moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Richard had been teaching at a women’s college, to Arkansas, where he’d taken a job at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. We had lived in Milwaukee for nine years, the longest period of time we had stayed anywhere, and the first place I’d begun to grow roots and develop a sense of belonging and community. Leaving friends behind and beginning again terrified the scared and introverted little girl who shared my forty-year-old body. Although the move made perfect sense in regard to Richard’s career, it was emotionally wrenching for me, and I assumed for both of our sons, one in seventh grade and the other in tenth. I hadn’t matured enough to handle my own emotions, and I projected them onto my children, taking on the load for the three of us and internally blaming my husband. Us against him. It was the rockiest stage of our marriage.

One of my most vivid memories of that time is of sitting beside Richard in our car in awkward and strained silence after a rare and unusually intense and hurtful exchange that had occurred just before we left the house. Words had been said and misinterpreted, and independent stories had been spun. Facial expressions had become stony, body language rigid and distancing. I don’t recall where we were going that day. It’s not important. What is important is that my body knew viscerally the intolerable pain of hell. Of separation from the beloved.

After we’d reconnected and I’d had a chance to consider the delicate nature of intimate relationships, even those that are solid and strong at the core, I wrote the following lines:

We are wounded spirits, you and I,

Speaking love in hushed and fragile voices.

It was intended as the beginning of a poem, but it never got completed. I believe it stands alone in describing our human condition. Perhaps we are all to some degree wounded spirits speaking love in hushed and fragile voices, wanting desperately to be heard and seen for who we truly are, to be rescued from the loneliness of going it alone, even as we live ostensibly happy and fulfilled lives.

Somewhere the deepest desire for a soul is to be appreciated, to be loved.
—Jean Vanier

Love Always Rules

What gives me hope is that life unfailingly responds to the advances of love.
—Nipun Mehta

Our fourteen-year-old granddaughter has a T-shirt that says LOVE ALWAYS RULES. It’s a potent reminder of what I choose to tell myself is the default position of the human race. We’re born with the GIVE AND RECEIVE LOVE setting in the ON position. Unfortunately, that default position appears to get reset in many of us as we encounter a world full of imperfect beings who have come to believe that love is scarce and unreliable and that we’re unworthy of it.

I’m not speaking of the fickle form of love that often characterizes romantic love, although romantic love may evolve into it, but of the Great Love that encircles, encompasses, and embraces unconditionally. The love reflected in the saying that home is where you’re always welcome, always accepted with open arms, never turned away. The place where the love of unconditional acceptance and inclusion “always rules.” The love that provides sanctuary.

How many of us can say we have such a sanctuary? How many of us provide one for others?

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
—Carl Sagan

The Healthiest Emotion

With all the woes of a world awash in bad news and manufactured drama, it’s easy to lose sight of the basic blessing we all share: the capacity for gratitude. For me, a potent reminder came during a Thanksgiving meal with our younger son and his family. My daughter-in-law suggested we each share one thing we were grateful for. When it was his turn, our then twelve-year-old grandson said simply, “Life.”

Endocrinologist Hans Selye, who did pioneering work in stress and its effects on the human organism, identified gratitude as the healthiest emotion. Spiritual teacher Arnaud Desjardins, in his book The Jump into Life: Moving Beyond Fear, tells us, “Gratitude is the first pure religious feeling.” While we may not relate to being “religious,” gratitude, to me, implies recognition and acknowledgment that a gift has been freely offered.

How many of us overlook being grateful not only for the big things, like life itself, but for simple kindnesses offered to us by others?

In the moments we are awake to the wonder of simply being alive, gratitude flows, no matter our circumstances.
—M.J. Ryan

Love’s Saving Grace

As I begin the day’s writing, I’m looking out at two young boys—perhaps eleven or twelve—talking with each other as they push their bikes across the grassy courtyard below my window. They’re deeply engaged in whatever young boys converse about when they’re out biking together on a sunny summer morning.

I also sense their two intangible companions: friendship and vulnerability. Friendship is obvious. It’s bright and vivid in these two young souls just beginning their life journey. Vulnerability is a paler ghost. Yet, in spite of the boys’ age and vitality and the protective helmets they wear, vulnerability is the stronger presence.

As full of life as they are in this carefree moment of youth, these two boys will at some point die. And they will leave behind others who deeply grieve their loss. This is what we all live with: the ever-present awareness of our own finiteness, as inconceivable as the thought of ceasing to exist is. Even more painful and terrifying is the awareness that, before our own death, we may suffer the loss of those we love even more deeply than we love ourselves; those we would give our own lives for.

How can we live with such knowledge without compassion? Without kindness to one another in our shared vulnerability?

While I was working on this piece, Richard and I had breakfast with a male friend at a neighborhood café. Our friend had recently returned from a visit to his mother and recounted an altercation they’d had which had cut short his visit. He told us his mother had recently joined a fundamentalist church and was proselytizing him about her newfound faith. She was concerned about the fate of his soul if he didn’t accept her church’s redemption beliefs. Even worse, her new church preaches that a parent is responsible for a child’s salvation and will suffer the pain of eternal separation from the child if they refuse to accept those beliefs. Our friend, an avowed atheist in his late fifties, was angry because his mother wouldn’t “listen to reason” and accept his disinterest. Although they’d previously had a close relationship and talked often, he’d decided to distance himself from her rather than put up with further proselytizing.

Richard picked up the conversational ball and shared his own story about having difficulties with his family when he left the church in which he was raised. The conversation continued as the two talked about the frustration of trying to “talk reason” with people who are adherents of fundamentalist faiths.

After listening for a while, I placed my hand on the table and said, “How about trying compassion?” Having gotten the attention of these two intelligent, caring men, I continued. “Imagine the state of terror a mother must be in if she believes her child is damned to hell and eternal separation from her and God if they refuse the salvation story she’s placed her faith in.”

Our breakfast companion got it. He put his own hand on the table in acknowledgment and said, “She’s right! What I need to do is go give my mother a hug!”

Where are we without compassion for one another?

Kindness Elicits Kindness

Deeds of kindness are equal in weight to all the commandments.
—The Talmud

The year before I was born, close to a century ago, a pioneer of the self-improvement movement named Dale Carnegie wrote a classic book called How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book is still in print. According to Wikipedia, “One of the core ideas in [Carnegie’s] books is that it is possible to change other people’s behavior by changing one’s behavior toward them.” Richard is living evidence of the accuracy of Carnegie’s belief. He’s fearless when it comes to initiating interactions with strangers. Even on elevators. And because he’s self-assured and isn’t looking for approval or validation—and is blessed with a quick and disarming sense of humor—people respond in kind.

“In kind.” In kindness. I define “kindness” as any overture made from a compassionate heart with the intent to connect and include. This is my working hypothesis: Approaching others with kindness without a personal agenda or the need to sell something (yourself, a product, an...