It seems like I am constantly reminding my children to "be kind" to one another. When I hear screams from the playroom, and "smack" I know that my daughter has slapped her brother. Then there is an about-face, and I hear quick footsteps zipping down the hall and finally an exasperated little boy asking me, "Mommy! Why is Quinn so mean?!?” (The woes of sibling life!)
As we know, empathy is learned in infancy and throughout early childhood. Developmental Psychologist Dr. Lawrence Kutner reminds us that, "By the time a child is about four years old, she begins to associate her emotions with the feelings of others. We do not expect 3-year-olds to understand how the things they say affect other people’s emotions. They are not empathic in the way adults or even well-adjusted [5]-6-year-olds are."1
Quinn is 3. She is a sweet, brave and a very kind child, but she is also a second born "little" sister. Teaching her to identify with the experience of another is vital to her developing empathy and being able to show kindness to those who are suffering--whether by her hand! or another’s.
One of the only ways I manage to cope with the lack of kindness and empathy that I observe in the world is by thinking of people as their toddler selves. Imagine 54 as a neglected, spoiled two-year-old with little opportunity to embrace the gift of empathy or observe and rehearse the practice of kindness. What a tragedy. We forget that empathy is a re-birth of others’ pain that becomes a vehicle for the healing of your own.
This poem is a powerful reminder for me that it is only “kindness that ties your shoes.”
***Kindness
Before you know what kindness 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 gaze at 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.
***Listen to author, Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952 read it herself at
https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/kindness-by-naomi-shihab-nye)
1) https://psychcentral.com/lib/how-children-develop-empathy/
2) https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/kindness