I have a friend who is living in poverty, depressed, and unsure how to get unstuck. We decided the best way forward is one small step at a time, and so I bought her running shoes and took her out for chinese food.
This tiny gesture briefly lifted the weight off her shoulders – gave her a sense of relief, a sense that she is not in this alone, a sense that she is worthy of help and hope. And of course, it gave my own cringing soul a way to stretch again.
I don’t know why I forget how easy it is to fight the forces of hate. I guess I’ve been feeling so crushed by this bullying, racist climate; so flattened by the heavy torrent of injury and insult; so immobilized by the epidemics of addiction, poverty, hopelessness and hate that the swell of darkness felt like all the planets were made of barbed wire and bound together in endless, impossible, tangled loops. My mind has been bent in bloody complications. I’ve been pushing and fighting against it all, struggling to figure out how to start, hatching elaborate escape plans, concentrating all my intellectual and spiritual superpowers on the center of the universe and how I might set humanity free!
And I forgot how easy it really is. Go be generous and kind in any small way, today. New shoes and lo mein didn’t change the world – but for a time, it changed the way two of us experienced it. We woke released – she, from solitary confinement, and I from “cellblock trump”. We met in open air – and remembered what it is to be human.
Starting Close 