Reason
for Kindness
“Man
wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have presence in the
being of the other…Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him
to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.”
Martin
Buber (I and Thou)
I
recall the first time I tried to read I and Thou, Martin Buber’s
masterpiece, I was in a 3rd year Philosophy class at Western
Carolina University, though I was only a freshman, straight out of a small,
mountain high school. Buber was an Austrian Existentialist, and his way of
expressing himself might as well have been written in Mandarin for me. At 18, I
understood nothing of relationships much less human soul to human soul
encounters. By graduate school, some 12 years later, I could at least follow his
line of thinking. Now, in my dotage, I would like to read it again because
after a lifetime of experience, I just might comprehend what he wrote.
The
quote above shows how much we humans take our cues from others; how much we
look for approval and acceptance from people we love and admire. We draw our self-identifying
traits from reading this unspoken human language of raised eyebrow, furrowed
brow, down-or-upturned mouth, crossed arms. We instantly feel either received or
rejected by what our eyes read. If verbal criticism or, god-forbid, sarcastic bullying,
or indifference occurs, we feel crushed and set-back in our emotional confidence. Which is why, it is so important to uphold one another, to lift-up
and support all efforts of a child or an adult to move forward, create, and put
themselves out in their vulnerability. It’s how we learn to trust, or to distrust.
You may well imagine, or
perhaps you have experienced, how defeating and emotionally damaging it is to
grow up in a family or in a community one cannot trust. It takes a long time and many successes in
life to overcome, but amazingly, we do overcome incredible odds. We do have many
opportunities to learn trust—though they too are dependent on human responses.
So, one asks oneself, do I want to help people grow and prosper, or do I want
to cut them down to the dirt with my words and actions. Because, the way we
treat each other, the way we talk to one another, matters. Kindness supports
growth. It’s as simple as that.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment