Choosing Kindness

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The ride on the crowded R train was a little warm, particularly in my regular work attire of slacks and a button down. My fellow commuters were in their quiet rush as they exited the subway and then headed up the stairs to the busy street. I crossed Broadway and went into the office. It was a normal day.

As I walked into our work area, Brian, my colleague and friend on our consulting project, was the only other one from our team there. He immediately said “we need to go up to the rooftop deck.” I followed him up to the rooftop of our office in SoHo. A small, almost reverent group had already gathered on the deck.

About a mile to the south, the World Trade Center was on fire and pouring smoke over the city.

To this day, I’m not exactly sure what I saw from the rooftop deck that day in 2001. I do know it felt like a scene from some high-budget action film…where the scale of destruction and tragedy just makes it all so unbelievable.

Except those of us on the deck were quickly coming to terms with the fact that it was real.

There are some images and memories from that day that are burned into my brain, as they are for all of us that were alive and old enough to take in those images. And there’s one aspect of my experience in NYC that day that stood out for me.

As a Texan with deep south Georgia roots, I had seen and eventually adopted a set of social behaviors while growing up. Things like making eye contact, even with strangers, and offering a nod, saying hello, and lifting a couple of fingers off the steering wheel as you pass the other truck on the 2-lane highway. And in my twenties, particularly after a drink or two, my accent had a little more twang to it, so I was told.

Perhaps it was the combo of those traits that led my manager on the NYC consulting project to give me the nickname Dale. As in Dale Earnhardt.

Arriving on the project in NYC in early 2001, I realized the average New Yorker moved through the city with a certain determination that didn’t include as much explicit noticing of others as I had defaulted to. And I’ll be honest in that I found it to feel a little cold in that way. Of course that didn’t hold true 100%, but it certainly was the vibe I got. And I leaped to some judgments from that assumption.

But 9/11 dispelled my misconceptions about NYC. I distinctly remember seeing a group of strangers care so gently for a man in a business suit, stumbling up Broadway, covered head-to-toe in a thick layer of ash and dust from the towers’ collapse.

Versions of that played out all around me that day and in the weeks that followed. There was a noticing of and caring for one another that was in full view. The “how are you?” was an actual question, requesting an honest answer. That depth for genuine care had always been there, but just not on obvious public display.

I believe in our innate ability to be kind and care for each other. Our noisy lives can suggest there is some “them” that our “us” can’t like. But hard times can clean that slate in a hurry, when we return to the knowledge that we are all in this together. That we are all doing the best with what we’ve got. That your joy is my joy, and mine is yours. That your struggle is mine, and mine is yours.

Deep inside each of us, we know this caring for one another is how it was designed to work. It’s the only way it can work. The faith traditions all point to it, and sometimes it takes a life-shattering experience to return to that knowing.

When the people that 9/11 morning cared for the man coming from ground zero, they didn’t first ask him if he was a Democrat or Republican, what his birth country was, or who he loved. They just cared for him unconditionally as the human in front of them.

And I recognize that the man was covered in ash and dust because a small group of people decided they hated America so badly they wanted to kill and frighten as many people as possible. But the very seeds of that hate began in one small interaction somebody saw, likely at an impressionable age, where a supposedly wiser elder chose to model hatred over kindness, fear over unconditional love, seeing the “other” rather than seeing us.

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1930s, once said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.” That quote is like a rock in my shoe - it asks me to rethink how I love beyond the folks that are easy to love. Love your enemy…that’s some committed, intentional work.

So rather than fueling fears and an us vs them view of the world, what if we had the courage to choose kindness? What if we chose kindness and curiosity with those whom we disagree, rather than trying to “win” some unwinnable argument? What if we elevated being kind over being right? What if we started looking a little harder to see the kindness already happening? What if simple and profound acts of care were increasingly what we saw all around us? What if the young people around us saw that modeled for them over and over again?

We are in a season headed toward only more us vs them, particularly with upcoming elections, so many polarized topics, and social media to fuel our addictive outrage. But screw the us vs them. We’ve seen how that works out, over and over again. Rather than that vicious cycle, let’s feed a virtuous cycle. As any kindergartner might tell us, just be nice.

So may we choose to be kind and honor our deep connection amidst our differences. May we check ourselves when we start leaping toward judgment and choose a pause to get curious. May we move forward from outrage. May we humbly remind ourselves we never have the full picture. May we care for the person outside our circle. And may we steer ourselves back toward the real possibility of a beloved community.

May we choose love over fear. It might just start with a nod.

With much love,

Matt

Below are some pre-smartphone pics from that time in NYC, 2001-2002.