Kindness

Practicing Human

Cory Muscara

Self Improvement, Health & Fitness, Meditation, Happiness, Mindfulness, Education, Personal Development, Wellness, Mental Health, Personal Growth, Presence, Positive Psychology, Self-improvement, Buddhism

5 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2020

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.
0:07.0	I'm your host, Corey Muscarra.
0:10.0	In today's episode, we're going to talk about how we most appreciate kindness when we most experience
0:17.3	loss.
0:18.3	More to come on that in a moment.
0:20.3	First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. So one thing I've talked about in the past and on this podcast is how when we're going through something difficult and we're not able to change the situation.
0:57.6	One way we can help ourselves get through it is to give the experience new meaning. This can be particularly difficult when we're going through
1:07.5	something that feels so painful that we're not even able to perceive the possibility of something positive coming
1:16.9	out of it.
1:18.6	So I came across this poem called Kindness that I think speaks to this new kind of appreciation for one
1:30.2	kindness but tenderness and gentleness in the world that can only really be
1:39.8	recognized and known when we've lost things and we've felt the fragility and pain of being human.
1:47.0	So I'll read you this poem called Kindness by Naomi Nye.
1:55.0	Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things.
2:00.0	Feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.
2:05.0	What you held in your hands, what you counted and carefully saved.
2:11.0	All this must go, so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the
2:16.8	regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop. The passengers eating maize and
2:25.8	chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity
2:31.8	of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white
2:35.2	poncho lies dead by the side of the road.
2:38.9	You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Cory Muscara, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Cory Muscara and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.