The army of kindness

On empathy and service

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*Contrary to tradition, today’s newsletter is an early release. It addresses a topic that I felt needed expressing. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or via email.

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Tree of Hope and Light Painting by Aurina Counts-Garbovits

As I watch parts of the world come brutally undone by a war breaking countless hearts and robbing countless lives of the gift of growing older, I’m reminded with acuity the value of kindness and compassion in times of turmoil. Despite the unspeakable hostilities that pervade wartime situations, certain elemental virtues and values, as I’ll explain, remain firmly stitched within the larger tapestry of humanity.

Over the past couple of nights, as an attempt to anesthetise myself from the incessant mainstream media coverage of the ensuing cold-blooded violence, I sought an alternative news medium - video livestreams posted by ordinary citizens residing in the heart of conflict zones. These amateur filmmakers are storytellers in their own right, capturing this rather discordant music of history as it unfolds, weaving them into the fabric of virtual memory, for all to access and experience. As one content creator explained, whilst staring down into the barrel of his 8mm video camcorder, he hopes that by fearlessly documenting the war in unflinching detail he will build a groundswell of information for posterity.

The videos were often filmed through mobile phones amidst the unfolding chaos and were thus less formulaic in both tone and structure to other more classic war-journalism productions. They were refreshingly stripped of any political or commercial self-consciousness and clickbait, earning it a level of authenticity absent from much of todays’ content. Debris-filled driveways, shattered city centres and the mass exoduses of terrified civilian populations cowering under metro shelters, all represented in its full unsparing ruthlessness.

Despite the widespread symbols of advancing aggression, the videos reverberated a disarmingly simple message; that kindness and human connection remain the greatest forms of courage and resistance. These basic values emerge as the sole refuge, when humanity is held at gunpoint.

Livestream viewers could easily sense, a palpable sense of instant camaraderie between weary strangers in the war-ravaged streets, all grappling with the profound sense of seismic disorientation and adversity that war brings to everyday life. In one scene, the audience is shown an elderly man at a local supermarket meticulously dividing up his provisions to share with a family who had unfortunately missed out on essentials due to the presiding strain on food supplies. In another tragically beautiful capture, a group of shop patrons rush to the aid of a young man, who collapses on the sidewalk, wailing hysterically presumably with fear, as air-raid sirens ominously echo in the background. In both occasions, solace is offered through solidarity.

But kindness and human connection as concepts on their own reveal very little about the human condition. It is empathy that channels the generosity of spirit and fills us with a desire to be kind and a willingness to connect. American journalist and author, Rachel Corbett, has a wonderfully lyrical take on ‘empathy’ which she describes as “the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection”.

She writes:

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin.

Corbett’s words invite an auxiliary observation: empathy is a journey that sails us past the choppy waters of self-centredness to acknowledge that there are others who are also in possession of ‘selves’. While suffering sensitises us to the plight of others (‘their selves’), our existence, as a whole, achieves meaning through an ever-present network of invisible connections that bind us together, a concept that Einstein (out of all people) explores with much philosophical rigour.

Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions, a book that has become my personal existential pillar of comfort, provides an elegantly summarised take on how the value and purpose of ones’ life is, in part, based on the actions of others who contribute, either knowingly or unknowingly, to a cause that transcends their own self-interests and desires. This is a largely humbling insight and one that obliterates the ego as the sole arbiter of the good life.

…without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Our actions and desires are bound with the existence of other human beings. The nourishment we seek from life, be it food, clothing or shelter, are creations that others have meticulously grown/built in the spirit of service, regardless of presiding motivations, agendas or intent. No matter how you dice it, life assumes meaning through these inextricable connections between human souls.

The measure of closeness between people is not the magnitude of intensity or level of proximity between individuals but the ability to dance across the entire spectrum of being, with the self-awareness that our experience in life is a product of these invisible sacred bonds that unspool a complex, inexpressible universe of connectedness.

Even with ongoing senseless bloodshed and gut-wrenching suffering, we see, in brief moments of reprieve, underneath the dust, rubble and anguish, the frayed threads of human connection, held together by the fibres of empathy. Moments that clarify, concentrate, and consecrate what it means to serve in the army of kindness.