Random Acts of Kindness: A one year challenge
I know a woman who, along with her husband, have given me the unique chance to step back and consider lessons to be learned from current & past events in my life.

I am going to start today’s blog with a sappy metaphor.
You: Nice to get this out of the way, as opposed to you ambushing us part way through as you typically do with the sappy and/or thinly structured. metaphors.
Me: 😛 This is the emoticon for me sticking my tongue out at you, in case that was not clear.
As I was saying before you rudely interrupted, I hope you will see beyond the surface of what I acknowledge is a trite metaphor and look for the potential value to the exploration on RAK that lies beneath the sentimental veneer. Remember, I am extremely sincere in my sentimentality so roll with me here.

Our histories plant the gardens we walk through in our day-to-day lives (You: Oh, for fuck sake! Are you kidding me? Me: Hear me out). What grows and what we must navigate everyday are from seeds planted by others, often long ago. The foundation of what has grown has little to do with us or our choices. There is a tiny percentage of us who get amazing, well-cared-for gardens filled with flowers and plants carefully nurtured (I vote we hate those people out of sheer jealousy). Some of us get poorly tended, or even abandoned, toxic gardens completely choked with overgrown weeds, weeds so high you cannot even see that there is a garden under all that tangle. the kind with big, sharp, nasty thorns or leaves that can burn your skin such that it blisters. Most of us fall somewhere along this continuum. At some point the garden becomes our responsibility, there is the potential to reduce the weeds, cut back the overgrowth of vines and poison ivy, plant things lush & beautiful, but that is dependent on our ability to become effective gardeners. Just because it is now ours does not mean we have a clue how to tend this garden anymore than those who planted it. Of course to add to the cruelty of this situation, the more toxic and weed-choked our garden, the less likely we are to be able to become the kind of gardener who can change the landscape in which we must exist.

You: Okayyyyyyyyy…….
Me: Now back to random acts of kindness.

Right before I left for the Philippines a couple weeks ago, it got quite nippy in DC as Winter did a test drive through the city, completed a few laps, then drove off again with a hearty “Woo hoo! I’ll be back soon.” It was nothing like our brethren across the northern tier states experienced but plenty cold enough to remind me that as much as I like wearing sweaters (and I really like wearing sweaters), I am not that big a fan of the freezing-ass weather that justifies sweater wearing. I guess we will see if I can man up or if we are in for a series of blog posts where I whine about the weather (as opposed to what I usually whine about).

There is an old woman (like maybe 126 years old? It is hard to tell after a certain age) that lives a couple houses from me. Given the cold of the week, one of my random acts of kindness was to bring her garbage cans back to her yard after the guys came by and smooshed the neighborhood’s trash with that big trash smoosher they have on their truck. Side note: I once saw the trash smoosher eat a large sleeper sofa with a heavy metal frame. It was awesome.

As I did my RAK, I was reminded of a similar event a few years back, long before the RAK Challenge, where I was the recipient. Some context: The house next to mine used to be a rental that was occupied by a middle-aged woman who was raising some of her grandchildren while their parents struggled with the ugliness that is addiction and life on the streets. At various times, grandchildren and their parents would come and go as the family suffered through the roller coaster of recovery and relapse. Overall we got along well.

One day as I came home from work, her son was just leaving and we stopped to talk. It turns out he brought my trash cans in that morning, a nice neighborly gesture, but what struck me at the time, and has stayed with me over the last several years, was his description of the experience of having done this. He was bringing his mom’s trash cans in, saw mine, thought about it for a bit and then decided “oh what-the-hell, Erik’s pretty nice to my mom, I’ll go ahead and do this.” It was clear from our conversation his doing this type of act was a really BIG deal and a rare occurrence. This act was out of character for him and out of the norm for his world.

I would like to point out that I had to walk down the street a couple houses (well just 2 houses) and it was freaking cold when I did my RAK, while he didn’t have to walk and the weather was lovely (Whomever calculates the scores, you see I am angling for extra credit, right?), but when you get down to it, we did the Exact Same RAK. For me it was a small act of kindness in a chain of acts of kindness within the context of being a giving, empathetic, “nice” guy in general. For him it was a really BIG deal, a rare event, one that left him surprised at his own behavior and which he continued to mark as highly noteworthy hours later.

This story has nothing to do with one of us being a better glob-o-human than the other, one RAK being more or less worthy, with me being some sort a righteous, upstanding member of the community and his being a some sort of thug momentarily off the streets. No. None of that is true. Don’t get me wrong. Assuming I was the one rated the better person (the likelihood this would be the assessment is open to much debate), it would be super cool if it was true because I could be smug and use the comparison as a way to tell myself stories about how much more valuable and fundamentally kinder I am. Seems a great strategy for shutting up some demons calling nasty and hurtful names from the basement. However I, sadly, knew to my core none of that is true. And what a valuable and useful interaction it still was.

For me the value of that interaction back then and juxtaposed to my own recent trash can act was the awareness that popped. Sometimes there are things that happen, encounters we have, that make you realize just how narrow your vision of the world is. My neighbor’s son and I may have both been standing in my driveway, but we were in different universes. That moment between us was the smallest of glimpses into a place I have never been. And that small glimpse revealed the vast gulf that existed between the basic assumptions we each had about the world. I became keenly aware that the very ground we walked on each day was a different earth beneath our feet.

How did our earths become so different? Do I get to win some cool prize for living a morally better life? Sadly, no, no prize for me. From the perspective of the metaphor we started with, he and I were gifted very different gardens. It is not hard to imagine that his is on the end of the continuum of toxic with massive, thorn-laced weeds. Amazing and meaningful that, even if for a moment, he took a step on a path of thinking about an Other considering he had to fight through denser and more vicious bracken then I ever would. I was touched then and am even more so as I tackle a year of RAK.

My garden? What are the planting in the earth I walk through? In surveying the landscape it is apparent I have a history which planted many difficult, pain-inducing weeds, and also planted space to navigate those weeds and lovely plants. I have been working hard to stay on top of and reduce the weeds through chopping, weed-killing chemicals, and pulling (only the smaller weeds thus far as the largest are still rooted too deeply, maybe some day) while trying to plant more flowers.

I look at this mess that is my garden and I know I am lucky, lucky for the spaciousness, lucky for the flowers and plants, but most of all I am lucky for the repeated chances I have been given to learn how to be a gardener.