Ep42 -- A Kindness Reminder

Well, it's election day.  We made it.  It took lots of deep breathing and plenty of hard liquor, but we made it.  You know, I actually started this podcast as a way to help myself, and hopefully a few others, make it through this election season.  To remind us all that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, most people are mostly decent.  And it's actually our decency and our desire to be with other people, that makes us vulnerable to those who want to divide us up for their own selfish purposes.  So this week all I want to do is replay the poem that inspired this podcast.  

Stay tuned.  

This is The Great Ungaslighting,  and this is "Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris. Enjoy. And I'll see you all on the other side.   

 Small Kindnesses  

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”