I’m still looking for antidotes to the cruelty and brutality of those who currently “govern” us. An antitoxin to the pure heartlessness of those who are stripping this country and much of the world of safety and food and medicine and education. Robbing us of acceptance and possibility, of research into the treatments that so many need, of a fulsome understanding of our history—and the roles that so many played. A countermeasure to stop these villains who are sabotaging our past, our health, a bearable now, and our children’s lives and opportunities. All in the service of greed and fear and resentment and payback. The depravities and insecurities of little, little petty people.
For sure, we need information and vigilance. We must talk with our children. And seek out the podcasts and essays that explore what’s happening. We have phone calls to make, emails to write, marches to join. We must figuratively stand on a chair or a soapbox and shout out about the obscenities occurring. And be savvy about our next moves. About the battles we must fight.
But how do we live? In what spirit do we fall asleep at night and wake to new horrifying days? Even when I soothe myself with the cats, with small notes to our delegation, with pondering the longest views of time and the cosmos—my heart is heavy.
I am literally—gutted. Despairing.
Many evenings the British series “Call the Midwife” offers a soothing, diverting fifty-minute escape. Part historical reality and part damn fine theater, the program showcases midwives in London’s East End in the 50s and 60s. Nurses and nuns committed to being present at the beginning and end of lives—of every sort. World War II pensioners, prisoners, down-and-out meth drinkers, teenage girls, mothers facing another child they cannot feed, parents of the first thalidomide babies, abortionists and those who’ve sought their services, homosexuals facing disgrace and punishment, suffragettes in their final hours. Shopkeepers. Alcoholics. Prostitutes. Everyone.
The midwives who attend to these births and transitions do so with acceptance—rather than judgment. With good humor and grace. With easy kindness. With honest tenderness. After several weeks of reruns for a series that’s now in its fourteenth season, I finally—embarrassingly but finally–began to take that kindness truly on board. To realize that when I went to bed, I didn’t just replay that evening’s storyline, I also could feel the healing that genuine tenderness created. A bit of—well—stillness, equanimity. Something besides the insidious anxiety that has otherwise shadowed my days and edged into nights.
In the show, tenderness presents as accepting a “cuppa” even in a damp, cockroach infested flat; as handing over a “barley sugar” sweet to a patient’s young child; as inevitably praising a laboring mother for her excellent work mid painful contraction; as pressing a hankie into a sobbing father’s hand. Knitting booties or assembling garden vegetables or hemming school uniforms for a destitute family. Thinking up games that won’t embarrass a child with handicaps. Learning a bit of Sylheti for women just arrived from Bangladesh. (And no, I haven’t forgotten that these are actors.)
Sometimes speaking a needed but unwelcome truth. Listening. Taking time. Always taking time except in the face of an emergency. Nothing extravagant or self-important or showy. Just the simplest, quietest feather-light gestures of respect and comfort. A kind of caring that wells up from deep inside these nurses. Not “put on.” A lived kind of tenderness.
That empathy seems to me to be the impenetrable armor against the inhuman, inhumane behaviors of this administration. Given the millions that are being harmed directly by the “government’s” actions, our world needs that kindness, that tenderness all the more. Not just food banks filled to the brim. But shoulders on which to cry. Hands stretched out to other hands. Time offered. Listening shared with no hurry, no flinching. Not a flicker of impatience or smugness. Given not just to people directly impacted by Trump’s horrors. But with every single person we meet. Because we all deserve that. Because it changes the pH level of each day and moment.
Is that something that I can do? Or more accurately, is it something I can be? Can I live tenderness? For sure I need to recalibrate. With all the retirement time available, I can slow down. At this age, I can smile and say hello to everyone. Everyone. I don’t need to do some quick scan for acceptability. I can say a far more deliberate “thank you” to the fussed and unappreciated Staples employee who’s beleaguered with Amazon returns. I’m can make banana bread—and share it with my 85-year-old neighbor who does more snow shoveling than I do. Well, there are actually a lot of banana bread thank yous I could offer. I know—in my heart—which texts and emails I’ve shied away from answering right away. I can do better. Mostly, over my treasured first cup of candy coffee, I can breathe and feel. And begin to absorb the gentleness—the kind that I enjoy with the cats—that can become the bedrock of my day.
At odds with the outrage we need to feel in the face of Trump’s wickedness? Or the actions we need to take? No!! I do not believe that we’ll vanquish the current brutality and greed by behaving with brutality and greed ourselves. I don’t think that ugliness and cheating and gaslighting can serve as effective strategies or attract others to our cause. Maybe I am hopelessly naïve. But I believe that panic and anger will not serve as well as hope and kindness. I believe that the villains we face are beyond insecure. Beyond unhappy. They are ruled less by smarts and more by fear. I believe that we live in a universe that demands—not bullying or ugliness or sarcasm—but the opposite.
I’m thinking now of the men—largely the men—who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and desecrated property and threatened lives. They joined a gang of toughs who all thought they’d belong, who all felt called—maybe for the first time in their lives. Even with the pardons that Trump has bequeathed them, I’d put money on the likelihood that they remain lost boys. Angry boys. Tenderness won’t change them overnight. But it might surprise them. Unsettle them.
More important, while we drum up political strategies and strong words. While we make a million calls and write a thousand letters to our congresspeople, living tenderness – living our own kindness will—no matter what—change our own lives. Dilute the anxiety in our guts. Cast a brighter light into the darkness. Remind us of the universe’s miracles. ©
*“Try a Little Tenderness,” ultimately made famous by Otis Redding, first appeared in 1932. While Glen Campbell premiered “Try a Little Kindness,” written by Curt Sapaugh and Bobby Austin, in 1969:
. . . .Don’t walk around the down and out
Lend a helping hand instead of doubt
And the kindness that you show every day
Will help someone along their way
You got to try a little kindness
Yes, show a little kindness
Just shine your light for everyone to see
And if you try a little kindness
Then you’ll overlook the blindness
Of narrow-minded people on the narrow-minded streets. . . .
