The world has changed in so many ways in recent decades—and as a result, meaningful connections are increasingly elusive. TheCommunity of Kindness encourages us to create new ways of building community through the practice of kindness. It is through that effort that we become most fully connected, alive, and integrated.
From the people who brought us Random Acts of Kindness, this insightful book can not only lift your heart, but fill it with the happiness that comes from feeling a sense of connection with the world and people around us.
The world has changed in so many ways in recent decades—and as a result, meaningful connections are increasingly elusive. TheCommunity of Kindness encourages us to create new ways of building community through the practice of kindness. It is through that effort that we become most fully connected, alive, and integrated.
From the people who brought us Random Acts of Kindness, this insightful book can not only lift your heart, but fill it with the happiness that comes from feeling a sense of connection with the world and people around us.
The Community of Kindness: Reconnecting to Friends, Family and the World through the Power of Kindness
336
The Community of Kindness: Reconnecting to Friends, Family and the World through the Power of Kindness
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Overview
The world has changed in so many ways in recent decades—and as a result, meaningful connections are increasingly elusive. TheCommunity of Kindness encourages us to create new ways of building community through the practice of kindness. It is through that effort that we become most fully connected, alive, and integrated.
From the people who brought us Random Acts of Kindness, this insightful book can not only lift your heart, but fill it with the happiness that comes from feeling a sense of connection with the world and people around us.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609252229 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2024 |
| Series: | Reconnecting to Friends, Family and the World Through the Po |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 686 KB |
Read an Excerpt
The Community of Kindness
Reconnecting to Friends, Family, and the World through the Power of Kindness
By Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
Copyright © 1999 Conari PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-222-9
CHAPTER 1
Longing for Connection
One of the truths of our time is this hunger deep in people all over the planet for coming into relationship with each other.
—M. C. Richards
We all want meaningful connections to those we love, to the places we live and the people with whom we share a neighborhood, a town, a country, a world. We want to feel that we're seen, known, and appreciated; we want to contribute, to make a difference in the world. We want to feel part of a larger whole, that our individual lives aren't, in the words of Daphne Rose Kingma, like a "cruel joke." In a word, we long for community.
And yet, such connections seem elusive, particularly now. We are so busy, we barely know our fellow apartment-dwellers, much less the old lady in the house on the corner. And when we do reach out, it seems that within a few months, we—or they—have moved on to the next job, the next relationship, the next town.
Our world is changing, and life seems to be sweeping us along with it. After tens of thousands of years of slow, almost incremental development, we are suddenly at a point in history when change itself is the moving force, moving faster and faster beyond what we can comprehend, much less keep up with. The process of that change is often blazingly apparent: the gadgetry of modern living invades our days, the bright lights and screaming electronics providing ever-present background noise and distraction. There is an aura of almost electrical excitement in the atmosphere as we move from cars, planes, and Nordic tracks to our computers, microwaves, faxes, and e-mail. Our mastery over our physical surroundings has brought us to the doorway of incredible possibilities, and yet we know intuitively that it has come at a price. We are beginning to realize that the most pressing challenge we face today is not technological, not to build a better machine, but to grow up as a species, moving past our reckless adolescence and taking conscious responsibility for our behavior. We are also challenged to find new ways of being connected to one another and to the Earth itself.
It is a task we are ill prepared for. We have spent most of our history in the throes of adventure, exploring, expanding, inventing, and conquering. The practice of introspection, contemplation about the meaning, weight, and purpose of our existence, has been largely the province of academic and spiritual leaders. The rest of us have simply tried to make do, dealing as best we can with the challenges of daily life. The weightier decisions, the power and responsibility for bending the flow of history, were out of our grasp. This is no longer true, for one of the side effects of the world's growing acceptance of democracy— combined with extraordinary advancements in communications technology— has been the steady emergence of public opinion as the ultimate source of power.
Political leaders can still lead and persuade, but the days when they could bend a nation's direction to their wills are fast disappearing. World opinion has an increasingly deeper and more profound influence on the behavior of supposedly "sovereign" states. Slowly, almost outside of our range of perception, the beliefs and opinions of individuals all over the world are becoming not only more clearly articulated and understood, but more powerful.
With that increase in power comes a parallel increase in responsibility, and that too is something people are beginning to take more seriously. From the international grassroots movement to ban land mines to the extraordinary global environmental movement, individual people are assuming a greater degree of personal responsibility for worldwide issues and are acting on it to an extent unimaginable just a few decades ago. We are recognizing how interconnected we are, how much of a global community we can be, but we are uncertain what forms these connections will take.
That's because the rhythm and structure of what we know of community is centuries old. Our way of feeling connected to a place and to the people of that place has not changed significantly in the tens of thousands of years of organized human history, and now, seemingly suddenly and irrevocably, virtually every old form of community is collapsing all around us. Small towns are becoming big cities or are being swallowed up by even bigger cities; extended families are spread out across the land; ties of tribe, clan, and region have ceased to fulfill the comforting task of locating us intimately within a community. The bonds that once held us have been broken, and we are left with a disturbing unease, a sense of being cast adrift. We are no longer sure where we fit or where we can turn for comfort and a sense of belonging. In theory our community has expanded globally, but in the marrow of our bones most of us feel cut off and alone.
This is a modern human problem. For most of history, belonging to a community was taken for granted. Whether clan, tribe, small town, or big-city neighborhood, it was there people were born and raised, and it was within community that individuals struggled to find their place. The fact of community was a given; the fitting into it and the defining of the individuals within it were the issues. In our lifetimes, for the first time in history, the ground rules have shifted. We grow up with breathtakingly unlimited opportunity to find our own ways, but in increasing numbers we grow up outside the steady comfort of any true community; the absence of that all-encompassing caress leaves us feeling deeply disconnected.
The Community of Kindness has grown out of our experience with the "Random Acts of Kindness" movement. As the publishers of three bestselling books, we have spent a great deal of time thinking about why the Random Acts of Kindness series struck such a chord; why, at last count, eleven countries, 40,000 individuals, 15,000 schools, 1,000 churches, and 450 towns, cities, and counties in the United States are participating in Random Acts of Kindness week in February. As the years progressed and the kindness movement grew internationally, it became clear that the success of the books, and the desire to do good deeds, random or planned, results from the sense of community created by performing such acts. When we feed the meter of a car about to get a ticket, we connect to the person who owns that car, even if we never meet. When we leave a bouquet of flowers on a neighbor's doorstep because we've heard he's having chemotherapy, we forge a bond, if only briefly. And when we read about such actions, we connect not only to those who have performed such deeds, but to the tribe of all others who are reading about them. It is out of our longing for community that so many of us have joined the "kindness revolution."
So we at Conari decided to write a book of meditations on community itself, a book that would encourage us all to connect deeply to those who are already in our lives, to think creatively about new ways we can reach out to the wider world, and to actively participate in the creation of new forms of community that will be deeply satisfying and help make the world a better place. The Community of Kindness is full of stories from folks who have received or witnessed acts of kindness, as well as thoughts from a wide variety of people who are working to create community.
As we thought about and spoke to people about the notion of community, we began to see that whatever forms of community emerge over the next decades, the one absolute prerequisite for their success is simple human kindness. It is only through kindness that the fundamental human desire to connect to one another will have the quality of compassion that allows us to understand and forgive the stumblings and failures of ourselves and others. It is our passionate hope that these meditations will assist us all in bringing kindness to the forefront of our lives, so that we can fulfill our longing for community in ways that better fit our changing world.
CHAPTER 2
Remembering the Kind Embrace of Community
We are members of one great body, planted by nature in a mutual love, and fitted for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.
—Seneca
In some deep, often unrecognized way, each of us carries in our hearts a yearning for the community we know has been lost—a closeness, a quality of connection to other people that sings with vibrancy and shines with vitality. This feeling calls out to us of a time and place of belonging, of comfort, of being nestled in the hands of unquestioned love and embraced by the warmth of acknowledgment and understanding; a place we can be ourselves and have impact on others; a place that feels like home.
The source of that longing is multifaceted. At its deepest level it speaks of our severance from the divine—the banishment from the garden of Eden. Once we were one, a seamless and effortless unity of love, and now there is a deep ache of emptiness. We have been thrown out and must make our own way back.
Echoing this spiritual separation is the very human separation that begins with our expulsion from our mother's womb and continues unabated through the childhood process of individuation, until we emerge into adulthood as a separate person. It seems that, at least in Western culture, half our life is spent separating, creating distance and boundaries so that we might know where the "I" begins and ends.
Sometimes we are given an extended experience of community during the magical time when we have left our childhood behind but have not yet emerged as adults. This is often a time of great personal openness, when we are more willing to trust, more ready to expose our hearts, more eager to assume the best of intentions and forgive the inevitable dissonance. It is often then, in our late teens and early twenties, living with friends in houses and apartments with a constant stream of people circulating through our lives, that we see for the first time what living within a true community could feel like.
Almost invariably, the unfinished work of discovering our own identity, our own needs and desires, pulls us away from these experiences of the comfort of others. For most of that journey of self-discovery, we are either too self-absorbed to notice or too easily mistake a crowd for community. All the while, however, locked away in our hearts is a deeply coded switch that, while we move into full possession of our own identity, sits inactive, only to be triggered at the moment of our success. It is then, in the moment that we become confident of our individuality, that we begin to feel the unmistakable pull toward a sense of true community.
It's easy to misunderstand the sensation. It often feels like a pulling back, back to something we once had—dreamlike memories of holiday gatherings full of happy smiling family; fragments of slow summer days with our friends at the water hole; fishing with Dad; a Fourth of July barbecue with all the cousins. Sometimes it isn't even our own memories we grow nostalgic for, but the wonderful stories of the "good old days" told by parents and grandparents, full of love and comfort and warmth—or even stories from books that evoked in us a powerful longing for "simpler, kinder times."
As real as those memories might be, it is not the past we long for, not the old forms that we so desperately need. For most of the old forms of community were built around exclusion and conformity. It was "our" club, our town, our church, our neighborhood, our country, and it was our "sameness" that set us apart from others. We _______ (fill in the blank—Italians, Irish, Germans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Blacks, Catholics, Protestants, Jews) stuck together.
The old forms of community have given a us a rich tradition of accomplishments and have taught us much about how to be in a community, but they have also instigated and fueled conflict and bloodshed: tribe against tribe, nobility against commoner, religion against religion, country against country, race against race, class against class. The comfort of our sameness has, all too often, led to hatred, fear, and violence against "otherness." (Witness the terrible bloodshed going on in places where this sense of tribe is still strong—Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and Rwanda, to name just a few.)
While we long for what we have lost, it cannot be found in the past. With our hearts full of kindness for one another, we must blaze a new path.
Across the Divide
There are no great people except those who have rendered service to humankind.
—Anonymous
"When I was growing up, I was always smiling, always looking on the bright side. Even in my teens and early twenties my friends used to call me the 'cure for depression.' I can't even remember exactly how I ended up where I did—it seems like my life just unfolded badly—but by time I was thirty, I had sunk into a pretty frightening depression of my own.
"Most of my friends were avoiding me, because I was suddenly the one who needed to be cheered up. A lot of issues which had been trailing me for years, which I had been ignoring, just camped at my doorstep and wouldn't go away no matter how hard I tried to banish them. I finally realized I was supposed to actually deal with these issues, not just smile harder and pretend they'd go away. Things did improve with that realization, but it still felt like I was running in sandevery—thing was difficult, brown, and gritty. Having given up my 'It's OK, I'm fine' routine, it now seemed I was being exiled to a world where I would never be all right again.
"Then one day heading home from work, without any conscious plan, I got off the subway a few stops early and found myself walking into a coffee shop. I remember sitting down and wondering what I was doing there, and at exactly that moment a gray-haired woman walked up to me and asked me if I was following her. I was totally flustered and sputtered out some incoherent denial. She took my hand, sat me down, ordered me a drink, and told me she had been sitting across from me in the subway and noticed that I seemed pretty distracted, and wondered if I wanted to talk about it.
"The situation took me so much by surprise that it cracked me open like an eggshell. I sat there for almost three hours talking to this woman, laughing, crying, and just feeling alive again after what seemed like a long sleep. Her reaching out to me made all the difference! While I continued to struggle for a year or so, I would remember her kindness to me and have hope."
Sometimes, it takes a total stranger to remind us how closely connected we truly are. It doesn't necessarily take a lot of work. When we can extend ourselves across the barriers that separate us, and gently touch the heart of another, it resonates like the ringing of a well-crafted bell.
Our Longing for Rootedness
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
—Simone Weil
"I live in a very nice house just outside Chicago. When we first moved here, I was so excited. We had lived in a rented apartment downtown ever since we got married, and I had grown tired of the noise, the space limitations, having no yard, and a constant series of minor but irritating neighbor problems. One of the first things I did in our new house was to fix up the yard, which had been neglected. While I was out there digging away, some people from the neighborhood came by to welcome us and comment on the flowers I was putting in. It felt so wonderful.
"We've been here for six years now, and I still love my house and I really love working in the yard and turning it into a place of beauty, but I realized a while ago that something important was missing. At first it was hard to pin down, I just knew that somewhere in my life there was an empty place where something good was supposed to be. After flailing around (I even tried blaming my husband, but fortunately he just laughed), I finally realized that it was other people I was missing. Not anyone in particular, just friendly faces saying good morning, talking about the weather or gardening. I had everything I wanted in a neighborhood except the hum and sparkle of people just being friendly. I realized that for me, it isn't just the physical beauty and arrangement of home and garden that are important. More than anything I need to feel the sweet energy only people can provide.
"Once I decided what was missing, I set out to draw my neighbors outside their backyards a little more often. At the beginning of December, I wrote up about thirty invitations to a 'neighborhood open house' for a Sunday afternoon between three and six o'clock during the holiday season and slipped them under my neighbors' front doors. The time rolled around and my husband and I sat there, worrying if anyone would show up. Well, around forty people started swarming the place, and everyone had a great time. It was so successful that someone else volunteered to host a neighborhood swim party in the summer. And that afternoon we talked a bit about traffic problems and crime and decided to hold quarterly meetings to deal with these issues."
Sometimes all it takes is someone to get the ball rolling. If the need and desire is there, the effort doesn't have to be strenuous. If you are sitting in your house wishing to be closer to your neighbors, chances are they are feeling the same way too. Initiate a get-together and see what happens.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Community of Kindness by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Copyright © 1999 Conari Press. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
1 Longing for Connection
2 Remembering the Kind Embrace of Community
3 The Path to Community
4 The Power of Kindness
5 The Transformative Nature of Community
6 Experiencing the Kind Caress of Community
7 Only Kindness Allows for Community
8 The Practice of Community
9 Giving from Plenty
10 We Are a Community of Kindness
Acknowledgments
About the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation