Poem: Kindness

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.

                  Naomi Shihab Nye

The purpose of life

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around,
and don't let anybody tell you different.

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look for the helpers

When I was a boy
and I would see scary things in the news,
my mother would say to me,
"Look for the helpers.
You will always find
people who are helping."

Fred Rogers

 

 

 

 

 

The riddle of the universe

Every human life
involves an unfathomable mystery,
for man is the riddle of the universe,
and the riddle of man
is his endowment with personal capacities.
The stars are not so strange
as the mind that studies them,
analyzes their light, and measures their distances.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, On Being a Real Person

 

 

 

 

Invention

All of us have to learn
how to invent our lives,
make them up, imagine them.
We need to be taught these skills;
we need guides to show us how.
If we don't,
our lives get made up for us by other people.

Ursula K. Le Guin

 

 

 

 

Our duty

Indeed, Voltaire preached—
by example rather than by precept—
that the recognition of the truth
that this world is filled with evils
leads to a certain good humor.
If this life is a desert,
it is our duty to make an oasis in it;
if this life is a shipwreck,
we must rescue as many as we can,
and not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Candide: A Bilingual Edition

 

 

 

 

 

It's for you. . .

Remember that as a teenager
you are in the last stage of your life
when you will be happy to hear
the phone is for you.

        Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies