My Heart like a Better Place
On small kindnesses, better worlds, and Aracelis Girmay's poem "On Kindness."
I’ve been thinking lately about the small kindnesses we pay each other. How easy they are to eschew. But instead how readily we bestow them. This is a fancy way of saying nobody NEEDS to be kind but they are. That’s how I want living to be. I want living to be the kind of kindness we pay ourselves when we need it the most.
I’m sure it’s been said before, in some shape or form, that I wish life didn’t have to have a purpose. Not just not-all-the-time, but maybe even never. Look at lilacs—they grow, look pretty, smell good, and exist. Why can’t life be like that: wandering from amazement to amazement, asking questions, sitting in the silence of their answers, looking death in the eye and thanking the precious few moments we are given for a life. It’s okay to want that. To not dream of labor. To want to love and be loved and end at that. If you’ve been seeking permission let this be your sign. Humans are the only species asking of ourselves a cosmic purpose, and maybe we don’t have to.
But before we get too hasty here, let me say this: don’t eschew the kindness of giving yourself away. This is as much a life as any other, and it is perhaps the best kind of life. But let there be questions. Let yourself be wrong. Let yourself grow. Nobody ever said you had to know everything and was right. Maybe the best course of action is to just get lost—wandering from kindness to kindness in your bewilderment. I think there is a beautiful world out there if you can survive it, and I’m hoping every day it becomes more survivable.
The thing is though, if you asked me what kind of world I wanted most I wouldn’t be able to answer quickly. I wouldn’t be able to easily tell you what makes any world more beautiful than another. And maybe that’s because the world is complicated and all of our futures are intertwined so intricately. But let me say just this: when I think of a better world, I think of world a centering the kindest option for everyone. I think of a world without prisons, without police, without capitalist exploitation or norms, without borders, without harmful cultural systems predicated on prejudicial imaginings of people. And sometimes that’s the problem—we dream of better by subtraction. Yes, all these are intensely necessary to subtract, but what is it that we can add to our world to make it better also? What is it that we can do while we are dismantling these foundations of oppression?
I think maybe that’s where art comes in. Not that adding art to the world necessarily makes it better or more beautiful, but that art can help us imagine what to add to the world. I look to poems like “On Kindness” by Aracelis Girmay as a template for how to realize this better world I am imagining:
On Kindness
after Nazim Hikmet, for & after Rassan
At the Detroit Metro Airport
with the turtle-hours to spare
between now & my flight, there is
such a thing as the kindness
of the conveyor belt who lends me
its slow, strange mollusk foot
as I stand quiet, exhausted, having been
alone in my bed for days now, sleeping
in hotels, having spent months, now,
without seeing the faces of my family, somehow
its slow & quiet carrying of the load
reminds me of the kindness of donkeys
& this kindness returns me to myself.
It reminds me of the kindness of other things I love
like the kindness of sisters who send mail,
wherever you are, &, speaking of mail, there is
the special kindness of the mail lady
who says, “Hi, baby” to everyone, at first
I thought it was just me, but now I know
she says “Hi, baby” to everyone. That is kindness.
Too, there is the kindness of windows, & of dogs.
& then there was that extraordinary Sunday
back at the house, I heard a woman screaming
about how she was lonely & so lonely
she didn’t know what she’d do, maybe kill
herself, she said, over & over like a parrot
in a cage, a parrot whose human parent
only taught it that one sentence. I looked out
the window & saw her from behind, the way she flung
her arms like she was desperate & being killed
or eaten by an invisible predator, like a tiger or a lion, in the chest.
& her voice seemed fogged out with methadone, I don’t know,
something, & I walked away from the window
& sat, angry with her for screaming, & sad,
& not long after, I heard her saying,
What’d you say? What’d you say to me?
& a man’s voice, low, I could not tell if it was kind.
& she said, I’ll kill myself, I’m so lonely.
& did I tell you, yet, that it was Mother’s Day?
Flowers & mothers, flowers & mothers all day long.
& the woman saying, I’m so lonely. I could kill myself.
& then quiet. & the man’s voice saying, It’s okay.
It’s okay. I love you, it’s okay.
& this made me get up, put my face, again, to the window
to see my landlord’s nephew outside, just hugging her so, as if
it were his mother, I mean, as if he belonged to her,
& then, again, quiet, I left the window but sat
in the silence of the house, hidden by shutters, & was amazed.
When the front door of the brownstone opened up
& let the tall nephew in with his sad & cougar eyes,
handsome & tall in his Carolina-Brooklyn swagger, I heard
him start to climb the stairs above me, & my own hand
opened up my own front door,
& though it was none of my business
I asked him, Do you know that women out there?
& do you know what happened next?
He said, No. The nephew said no, he didn’t know
the woman out there. & he told me Happy Mother’s Day
as he climbed the rest of the stairs. & I can’t stop seeing them
hugging on the street, under trees, it was spring, but cold,
& sometimes in the memory his head is touching hers
& sometimes in the memory his eyes are closed,
& sometimes she is holding him
& singing to him I love you. It’s okay.
I mean to tell you that everywhere I go
I hear us singing to each other. This way. I mean to tell you
that I have witnessed such great kindness as this,
in this, my true life, you must believe me.
I mean, on a Sunday, when nobody was supposed to be
watching. Nobody at all. I saw this happen, the two
of them hugging, when nobody was supposed to be
watching, but not a secret either, public
as the street, not for glory & not for a joke,
the landlord’s nephew ready to stand there for the woman
like a brother or a sister or a husband or son,
or none of these at all, but a stranger,
a stranger, who like her, is an earthling.
Perhaps this thing I am calling kindness
is more simple than kindness, rather, recognition
of the neighbor & the blue, shared earth
& the common circumstance of being here:
what remains living of the last
two million, impossible years…
“On Kindness", from KINGDOM ANIMALIA by Aracelis Girmay. Copyright © 2011 by Aracelis Girmay. BOA Editions.
And it doesn’t matter if what happens in the poem really happened—though I’m pretty sure it did—because the poem is trying to teach us to be mindful of the kindnesses we engage:
between now & my flight, there is
such a thing as the kindness
of the conveyor belt who lends me
its slow, strange mollusk foot
as I stand quiet, exhausted, having been
alone in my bed for days now, sleeping
in hotels, having spent months, now,
without seeing the faces of my family
To call the conveyor belt a kindness is to recognize our state and needs—the exhaustion which makes its automation a kind thing, the loneliness so often imbued in our days, and it is these that makes recognizing kindness a way of staying rooted in the self:
its slow & quiet carrying of the load
reminds me of the kindness of donkeys
& this kindness returns me to myself.
It reminds me of the kindness of other things I love
This is the moment in the poem where we are invited to imagine our own small fires of warmth alongside the speaker’s. What is it you love? What is added to your world by others which makes it better? Friends, maybe take a moment to write down yours with me? My favorite kindnesses lately have been the ways my friends mirror my humor, how they reflect my joy—when they repeat alongside me the stupidity I often espouse: “Gerbis,” “spleen,” “elbow macaroni,” “Ryan Yarbrough,” all the little things I repeat a hundred times a day if only because the words sound funny and I like to make parodies of speech. Other favorite kindness include the way Heather reminds me to eat (I tend to forget for long periods of time), how Jacob and Kimmel chorus their hellos whenever I walk into their house, who(m?)ever left the donuts outside the entry to my lab this week, the way Molly listened when I told her about the experiments at work even though she had no idea what the hell I was on about—there are so so many.
The poem is about these small kindnesses, but it is also about timing. How there are moments so devoid of kindness or warmth that the insertion of even a small and fleeting grace feels like everything you’ve ever lost coming back to you. And this is called love. Love is sometimes the kindnesses we pay each other when they are our needs being met.
Beyond the recounting of favorite kindnesses the poem becomes fragmented, hurried, an attempted rehabilitation of the tendrils of a memory, like trying to grab all the pieces of a dandelion before they float away. It is an attempt to create from the enormity of the moment a crystallized entity, and it fails at that, which is what makes it so beautiful. There is not one single moment of that encounter which the speaker feels encapsulates its enormity. That the small kindness of this stranger hugging a crying elderly woman screaming about loneliness on Mother’s Day is magnified and carried across a thousand other memories and moments, carried into the present, and even into tomorrow:
I mean to tell you that everywhere I go
I hear us singing to each other. This way. I mean to tell you
that I have witnessed such great kindness as this,
in this, my true life, you must believe me.
I mean, on a Sunday, when nobody was supposed to be
watching. Nobody at all. I saw this happen, the two
of them hugging, when nobody was supposed to be
watching, but not a secret either, public
as the street, not for glory & not for a joke,
the landlord’s nephew ready to stand there for the woman
like a brother or a sister or a husband or son,
or none of these at all, but a stranger
The final moment is what makes this poem enduring for me, what constitutes a better world, every one of us starting from this moment and recognizing:
a stranger, who like her, is an earthling.
Perhaps this thing I am calling kindness
is more simple than kindness, rather, recognition
of the neighbor & the blue, shared earth
& the common circumstance of being here:
what remains living of the last
two million, impossible years…
This recognition of our shared circumstance of life; this one small blue dot in a cosmic sea so vast we can’t even comprehend it; and that this dot eclipses us a billion billion times over. We are so small. So fleeting. But in the fleeting moments of our lives we can be allowed so much beauty and love. And at the end of the day I think kindness is whatever we do that makes someone more able to recognize beauty and love in the world, whatever we do in service to the idea of making another’s existence more survivable. A better world is a world without prisons and patriarchy and heteronormativity and gender suppositions and capitalism, yes, but it is also a world where strangers hug when they’re lonely, where more meals are shared between acquaintances, more stars are watched together, more long drives with full cars of friends and loud music. A better world is made by the ways in which we center kindness. A better world is made by communities built around kindness.