I know a woman and her husband who have inspired me to find courage to walk toward when the expected behavior is to ignore.
Me: Hey. I have been a bit behind in posting lately. You: If by “a bit behind” you mean 40 days. Me: (Hanging head in shame) On the plus side I have continued my commitment to daily Random Acts of Kindness. I just haven’t written….although I have a really good excuse in that my crazy world has been spinning on a more than usual wobbly axis. I am writing today though! You: We quiver with excitement. Me: Sarcasm does not become you.
Today I engaged in one of the most intense RAKs I have done thus far. I was downtown with some visiting relatives on our way to a lovely brunch. We were way too early so had to walk around for a while before the restaurant even opened. As we walked, I was saw a couple who were obviously having an argument; she wasn’t saying anything but kept trying to walk away, he was speaking quietly but intensely and gripping her arm tightly, stopping her from walking away. It was one of those uncomfortable situations where you don’t know if you should say something, it wasn’t clear she was in trouble…still…. Maybe it is none of my business…is it rude to say something…..what if he gets violent toward me…what is going on, I can’t tell….still? I set my uncertainty aside and I took the easy way out and just kept walking. We had teenagers with us, don’t need to be causing a scene and trouble with teens with us. Just keep moving.
When we circled back to return to the restaurant, now a couple blocks up and on the other side of the street, we encountered them again. Things had turned ugly. There was a group of people standing about ½ a block away from the couple. Someone said, “Oh my god, they are fighting.” I walked to the front of the group to see him push her down into a bush and stand over her yelling and cursing at her. I walked toward them until I was about 10-15 feet away where he could see me (he did, we made eye contact, he pulled her out of the bush and, although still arguing, things dropped a notch), I took out my phone and called 911. I told the operator where I was and what I was seeing. She had me describe what the couple looked like and what they were wearing (as he was wearing baggy jeans, I was able to share that he was wearing grey underwear- we both had a laugh about that).
The police arrived, I waited a little closer until the officer was free, I told the officer that I had called 911 and he took my statement. A nice hippie girl walked by and said thank you for making the call. One of the adults in my group said that was an impressive demonstration to the teens of doing the right thing when others were frozen. I told her that the truth is I was so scared my voice was all quaking on the phone and I could feel one of my legs shaking. We both had a good laugh about that. She kindly offered that walking toward my anxiety when I didn’t want to meant that I got bonus points for this, and, as I am all about bonus points, I accepted them.
What I really wanted to share today is something I have noticed about two types of Random Acts of Kindness, both of which are “valuable” (assuming RAKs have value other than my earning bonus points). My brilliant categorization scheme divides them two categories: Doing and Being. Now, yes, according to the rules of my Year of RAK, all require some level of presence, so the distinction is whether the core activity is Doing or Being. Each makes different demands on us and, at least for me, Doing is much easier than Being. I present to you “A Tale of Two RAKs” (Please insert your own dramatic reading of what follows):
As we discussed many months ago, even though airports are about opening up our world, transporting us across distances undreamt of a couple generations ago through what has become a mundane process, airports ironically also pull for a special type of self-focused, anxiety-induced, small-world view that can become so narrow that our ability to see Other Humans is severely impaired. It becomes You in a sea of scurrying blobs of flesh, a sizable proportion of which appear to have been assigned by the Queen of the Hive the task of getting in your way. It is perhaps also ironic that in this same context of self-focused, anxiety-induced, small-world view, so many of these scurrying blobs of flesh are finding it difficult to navigate the mundane process of being transported across undreamt distances. Simply put, if you can find a way to rise above the plight of the Hive People, it is pretty easy to do Random Acts of Kindness in an airport.
On a recent trip, I accomplished several RAKs before I even made it to my gate. Yes, one must be present to certain extent for any RAK, but fundamentally all my airport RAKs involved Doing, not Being. My exemplar airport RAK was an interaction with an older woman who was behind me in the airport security line. She was not old enough to get the “leave your stuff on” TSA Get-Out-Jail-Pass, but was old enough to find the security procedure a bit intimidating and a tad confusing. I let her go in front of me, put her stuff in bins, asked the questions TSA would ask to avoid complications as she went through the magic scanning machines & generally shepherded her through. I figured a bit less anxiety & confusion made everyone’s day better.
On the other end of the RAK spectrum is a recent interaction with an elderly Hispanic gentleman. He approached me as I was getting out of my car, on my way into a building for an “important” work meeting. He was disheveled. His English wasn’t good, my Spanish wasn’t good. In our efforts to communicate, it quickly became apparent he was not drunk or stoned or schizophrenic or any of the other common flavors of mental illness you typically find on the streets. He was not acting or pretending. I came to believe he had dementia. The disease was in its early stages, but I felt the familiar interaction behavior pattern, the loosening of logic. I have seen this for several years in my world.
I don’t know that I ever truly understood what he was asking for, but, through his broken English and my broken Spanish, I was able to piece together some of the important parts of his story. As his story unfolded, his eyes welled with tears, which began to stream down his face, and eventually he was sobbing, waves of grief flowing over us. I tried to be as fully present for his pain as I could, and there was also a huge part of my brain that just wanted to know what the fuck he wanted and how I could make him (and his overwhelming fear and distress) go away. I don’t think he wanted money (What homeless person doesn’t want money?!!) because I gave him some money, he looked at it confused and kept talking & crying. I listened and I listened, trying to hear just what the “ask” was, just tell me what you need!
I listened and I listened, and then, instead of listening for how to make him go away, I just listened and tried be with him, tried to understand his suffering, tried to hear him. Nothing miraculous happened. I didn’t fix him. I didn’t save him. And I didn’t run away (even though I wanted to: “Look! It’s the Pope!!” (Me run off)). And still something got better. He quieted, we prayed together (I’m not a big prayer guy but it was obvious he was), he sang me a hymn in Spanish, I explained and pointed out how to get to a nearby church that had social services that might be able to help his pervasive problems. We went our ways; him seemingly more stable, maybe with more hope, perhaps more of a sense that another human had seen him as a Human and shared his pain; me sad, shaken, raw from the interaction, and a sense that I had seen and heard another Human and shared his pain.
If you should ever find yourself with a close-family-member-with-Alzheimer’s disease and you are wondering how to rip into your already inflamed heart, encountering an elderly homeless person with dementia will do the trick. Of course, if you should ever find yourself with a close-family-member-with-Alzheimer’s disease (or any of a zillion difficult life challenges), you may also find yourself in a place where you are better able to Be in whatever nasty, heartbreaking situation you are ambushed by, and it will suck. And you may find that you walk away with something important…..or not.
As always your experience and challenges with random kindness may be completely different from mine, revealing different lessons about who you are, what you fear, how you want to be different in your stream. For me, having the concreate accomplishment is easier. Probably because Doing allows me to push away my insecurities and keep at bay the monsters of Unlovable and Never Good Enough that lay in-wait in the deep, dark, cold waters, ready to rise up without warning. Ha ha, silly monsters!! Look, I just did something demonstrating my value and, of course, showing all just how worthy, perhaps even lovable, I must be with concreate evidence that can be pointed to as an example of my worth and worthiness. Being is more slippery, harder to bring forth as evidence in self-worth court, especially when monsters are doing the cross examination. And yet, it is growing ever more apparent to me that Being, although harder and often sucky, is where the value lies; value for interactions with Other Humans, value for interactions with the ones you care deeply for. Now, if I could only figure out a way to assign bonus points to Being. That would be epic.