Unkindness: Rarely Unpracticed

We all do it and we all don't do it. That is to say, we all, at least sometimes, treat others unlike the way we wish to be treated: with unkindness. Alternatively, we all neglect, not unusually, to utter that kind word for usually one of just several reasons. Perhaps we don't possess confidence in articulating the needed remark. Or we aren't paying full attention to the emotional need of a particular person at a particular moment. Or we are thinking exclusively of our own desires then and there. Or, rarer but certainly not unheard of, we know the agony of our fellow pilgrim but we take pleasure in his trials while silence enshrouds our devilish delight, giving our suffering fellow man no apparent cause for protest as we sneak away, free from reproach or illusorily, for the moment, from responsibility. Or worst of all, we simply don't give a tinker's damn (or a plain one). How many moments do we endure or allow to happen, that are converted into days, then months, then years and finally for some, into lifetimes that are devoid of the kind word, the compassionate communication, the enquiry that expresses caring?

Many silences are good and necessary, I'll grant. Life might quickly devolve into a suffocating existence if one and all assumed the role of a nanny with hands and nose as invading, clawing paws and poking instrument of enslaving possessiveness: concern corrupting into cajoling or even coercion, causing privacy and peace to be lost forever. Contrastingly, we all know about modernity's vaunted and coveted "space" and how inviolate we deem our privacy and autonomy: the freedom to sit in our own room, to think our own thoughts and to derive satisfaction from the fact (or to pretend) that we have licked that old bogeyman of loneliness and have raised victoriously, the arm of its far more socially attractive cousin: aloneness. After all, we have self-help guides, gurus of the contemplative life and other champions of meditation to, in turn, hold our hands (but, alas! not literally).

Ah, the Golden Mean, as well as the Golden Rule: down with both subjugation and freedom's isolation. How do we help without hindering, heal without bringing to heel? Is love a broken gift, long since smashed, when and if the useless remembrance to stamp "Fragile: Handle With Care" on it is at last heeded? This I know: there is no such thing as too small a kindness. This should cheer those who suppose their gifts trash. It is more difficult to believe in the converse: that there is no such thing as too great an unkindness. Christianity teaches this, but it's a hard lesson. And the world clearly has not or will not yet learn it.