random acts of kindness, part 313
I've had curiously numerous occasions over the past fortnight during which such acts have... surfaced. But, given the odd preponderance or clustering of these, then it's really not a random occurrence, is it?
Yet, neither is it a choice, per se. In all those instances I just felt compelled to extend a hand, a kind word, an understanding voice, a sympathetic glance — and these were received, with the ease and sincerity with which they were given.
One does not choose to do these things, one just does them; impelled, perhaps, by an inscrutable, equatorial sense that the balancing nature of the world is at play and must be abided.
Intriguingly, the mirror or shadow image of this has also appeared... in some unexpected moments of thoughtless cruelty or a gratuitously mean-spirited strike. These, also, have clustered around the same gravitational well or attractor state that one can only vaguely characterize as karmic. For, in every motion there is its like and opposite counterpoint.
I know I am being utterly vague here; it is intentional. To cite the instances with simplicity is to risk exposing the innocent, or outing the guilty: and I do not presuppose myself the final arbiter of what is good, and what isn't. Suffice it for me to say that, in the transpiration of time itself, these moments will vanish like the wisps of smoke they are... and yet the molecules will merely transform into something else. A word, for instance, conjures up a path, a universe of well-being and fracture both.
They would have instantly understood what I mean by all this.
Which was, of itself, a uniquely miraculous kindness... but from whom... well, the jury is out on that still. Though perhaps not for very long now.
[ Some hands lately: on the left, Pono's when showing me on FaceTime the sun he and I were sharing at the same moment (screenshot on iPhone); on the left, hands in the space of the 28 Fisherman's Wharf Muni bus one afternoon... ]
 |
 |