In this short, personal blog, David reflects on the power of kindness, and running
through fire.
Early one morning
“I’m leaving today.”
“Leaving?” I said, puzzled by the early morning call and pushing back sleep, “Where are you going?”
“Leaving,” she said slowly, “ending my life.”
I remembered that misty morning conversation, now many years ago, as I stood on Stratford station this morning. Samaritans are running an awareness campaign in London. I gaze at the big poster: 6000 people take their own lives in the UK every year.
For those of us who have never endured such depths of desolation I wonder if it is ever possible to imagine the pain of contemplation, of anticipation, of preparation. Try as I might, these people are strangers to me.
On the train
A young man is weaving through the train, sweating heavily. He stands at every door and makes a short pitch. “I am homeless,” he says, “I need to pay for a night in a hostel.”
“No more than the price of a coffee,” he tells us knowingly.
I study my phone. The lad is younger than my daughter and I study my phone.
He moves down the carriage. The older woman opposite reassures us all, perhaps herself more than anyone, a gift would only encourage him and it really wouldn’t help.
Encourage him to do what, I wonder. To be poor? To ritually humiliate himself in front of crowds of strangers, hour after hour, day after day?
I feel inadequate, shabby, disappointed in myself. I don’t know if he needs a bed in a hostel. I do know that he needs a bath, and he needs some help. It’s not, I realise as the day unfolds, the price of a flat white that bothers me most. It’s the judgement of strangers, people beside me, people in charge, people in my head. Asked to stand up, I studied my phone.
At the hospital
I arrive at Hammersmith hospital. A large sign greets every visitor: “The power of kindness.”
The woman on the train says kindness is for suckers and for softies, its naive and ineffective. My silence is complicit but the Hammersmith poster, and the data, tell us otherwise: Kindness has power. The power to “make a difference.”
I think again of that distant, misty morning. There were other ways of saying goodbye, letters in the post and notes on bedside tables. However unintended, or ambiguously expressed, the phone call was a sign, not a signing off.
My friend would have likely found another friend if I had missed the call. They’d have done what I did, little as it was, for we were her friends. You would do the same. So would the woman on the train. We’d run through fire for people we love but most of us study our phones when faced with a stranger.
Outside the fire station
On my way home I pass the Shoreditch Fire Station. Six lanes of rush hour traffic separate me from the huge hoarding but still it is unmissable: “LOVE IS THE RUNNING TOWARDS.”
The sign first appeared in 2023. I must have hurried past a hundred times but always I’m astonished. The size, the raw simplicity, the rush of images and emotions that it conjures from within.
I think of the unconditional physical courage of the first responders turning in when all instinct is to turn away. I think of that word on the hoarding. Not job or duty or service. Love is the running to strangers.
Caring for people we know is relatively easy. No less important for that, but still relatively easy. Caring for and about people we do not know is the human superpower, special only to our species. It is our greatest gift but sometimes also the most challenging.
Hello David,
Could relate to much of this. Thank-you. 🙂
I care when I can, but also caring is a currency we spend in transactions and sometimes when a few individuals take too much, I notice I am also spent… on the train, in the street, on the phone to a loved one. I have nothing left to give that day.
That said, I’m trying to walk the talk of a conscious conscience. It gets easier as I get older – perhaps confidence in taking both risks to care and speak up. To feel vulnerable in extending an offer and be OK if it’s rejected. (Like offering an elderly person a seat only to watch them sit at the back of the bus.)
As someone who’s moved around a lot, but have now made Sheffield my home – I’ve been a little surprised by the epic divide in the city (the money gravitates to the west side, the “workers” to the east). When I bought my house (on the east side), my surveyor commented that I seemed like a “west side of Sheffield woman” and it’s taken a few years to really understand what that meant. (Basically, a bit posh.). I’m OK with that. Trying to explore ways to seed my west-side expectations in east-side soil.
I took time off work today in Central Government to meet my local councillor and local lunch club, mainly run by pensioners. We are trying to tackle litter and flytipping in the area. This is a neighbourhood of antisocial behaviour, of drug dealing, drug taking, shoplifting and car stealing. It is also a neighbourhood of watering someone’s plants, taking out their bins, bringing round home-cooked meals, inviting folk in for a cup of tea, or a gin and tonic as the sun goes down. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can encourage more supportive gestures and discourage antisocial behaviour. And how to work with the indifferent machine of local government, but find those “bobby-dazzlers” who make stuff happen.
I’m still considering whether to get involved with a local fostering scheme – to offer love (or perhaps patience in the first instance) as a form of activism. It’s complicated for a number of reasons, so have settled on volunteering to be an “Independent Visitor” – a way of testing how I’ll cope with caring for someone I don’t know. Caring for people we don’t know or perhaps do know, but don’t like (!)is tough. I’m hanging on in there because I’m hopeful if I try to make change locally, I won’t feel so helpless globally.
Some years ago, I came across a book called Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit and love this quote as a reason to care when we’re running on empty:
““Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
Thank you for sharing this.