AND ANOTHER THING…
You’ll Need a Posse
Stories like this sound great, don’t they? I was having a bad time, then I tinkered with my mind-set, then I had a good time. A + B = C, right?
But it’s actually not that simple. It’s not that I just went and did a little kindness meditation and then everything was hunky-dory. Truth be told, that was just a single lucid moment—a beautiful moment, a moment of clarifying insight that I now use as a touchstone when I’m feeling blue. But just a moment. It didn’t heal all my problems or set me straight for all time.
In fact, if I’m going to be 100 percent honest with you, these kinds of clarifying insights are few and far between. A lot of the time most of us are just sloshing around in the dregs of our bad mental habits.
Which is why it’s so very important to have friends on the path. Because if we’re all alone on this little journey of mindfulness and good living, we tend to get pretty lost. Not only will we get caught up in the aforementioned bad mental habits, but we’ll get hypnotized by all the noxious ideologies of our dysregulated cultural moment (see chapter 5 for more on these ideologies).
So if you’re starting to jibe with what we’re saying here—if you think you’d like to meditate and not be a jerk and maybe give a little and all the rest—the first thing to do, in our opinion, is find other people who jibe with this kind of stuff, too. In person, if you can. That would be best. But if you live in a place where nobody’s talking about this stuff, you can always find a home online.
You’ll be really glad you did.
Okay, we were just talking about kindness. Let’s get back to that.
BE HELPFUL
You know the other great thing about cultivating kindness, though? It triggers our natural love of altruism. Now, you may object: A natural love of altruism? You might say, Hogwash. I watch the evening news. I know what people are up to. And it has nothing to do with looking out for your fellow mortals. But here’s the thing: humans, by nature, love to be helpful. We do. Don’t let the cynicism of our post-factual era get you down. The truth is that we’re built to aid each other. For example, Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist at Duke University, has run a long series of experiments measuring helping behaviors in young children. From the age of about eighteen months, kids start to help—they help each other, and they help adults.8
In one experiment,9 a researcher is hanging clothes. She drops a clothespin. Kids in the study run over, without being asked, to pick up the clothespin and give it to the woman who dropped it. In another, a researcher is carrying a bunch of books and can’t get a cupboard open. Kids in the study run over to open the cupboard. Unasked.
Put on these glasses and look around for an hour. Walk down a city street and watch people help each other. Watch as a guy holds the door for a teenager carrying groceries. Watch as a stranger smiles at another stranger in the street. Watch as people stop at stoplights.
All these are simple acts. And all of them express the better angels of our nature—we want to be helpful. We do ourselves a terrible disservice when we think otherwise.
But it’s easy to fall into the habit of thinking people are just out for themselves. Why? There’s a bunch of factors. The twenty-four-hour news cycle, so desperate to grab your attention, depends on the shock of people being despicable—the ultimate clickbait. Movies need tension—and what better drama than a crook or a villain? Yet day-to-day life is, by movie standards, pretty drama-free. It’s just dads waking up and getting their kids ready for school. Social workers finding housing for the homeless. Coworkers bringing coffee to the team. No headlines there. Goodness is just too ordinary to grab anybody’s attention. And yet. When practiced—when cultivated—it’s life-changing.
Here’s a little experiment to try. Just think of something sweet you did once. Like, for me, I helped a friend move. We had a great time together. And I smile when I think of it. No headlines, nobody even knows about it (except you now).
So what have you done in the last year that’s pretty okay? Doesn’t have to be big. Could be the smallest thing. You took a shift for your coworker. You sat up with a friend who was sad. Whatever. Now soak in that. Let your goodness sink in for a bit. And see how it feels.
Nice job. Next, think of something little you could do for someone else. Could be a kind word, a quick errand, a nice gift. You might send an email or a text. You might appreciate somebody. Or send good vibes. Now go do that thing.
* * *
—
Nobody likes a jerk. Being a jerk is a real downer. And we should really stop killing people—even online, even with words—if we want to live a happy life free of the hot mess–making madness of our questionable habits. And, by the way, we actually have choices. Every moment we have a choice. Kind of like flipping between radio stations. We can choose to remain like a block of wood for a minute, rather than blow a gasket. Better yet, we can choose to build kindness many times a day, every day, until kindness becomes our modus operandi, in such a way that we begin to be as helpful as possible, in a life-affirming upward spiral of glorious, glowing goodness untrammeled by…okay, you get the picture.
In any case, as we move along through these chapters, I think you’ll find that the principles we’re outlining—call them ethical guideposts, maybe—build, one upon another. Because here’s the thing. For most of us, a lot of the reason it feels like the world is wildly unhinged is because we don’t know—not really—what we stand for. Once we get unshakably clear about our own values, and once we get pretty good at using meditation to steady ourselves in that increasing clarity, then what other people do or think becomes a lot less crazymaking. Like the Buddha, we can learn to put our hand on the earth and say, “This is what I am about.”
In that spirit, let’s take a look at the next checkpoint. Because generosity is an essential building block of this semi-Buddhist survival guide for modern life.
GIVE A LITTLE
Devon
From a semi-Buddhist perspective, generosity is the very foundation of a decent life. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s very nice to live in a social world constructed of mutually enriching and well-intentioned munificence. Compare that to a bunch of unhappy creeps always trying to take each other’s stuff. Which would you choose? That’s the obvious point.
Less obvious—and maybe even more important for our purposes—is that generosity fills you up. This concept is one of those beautiful semi-Buddhist paradoxes that it pays to remember when you’re feeling bereft, discombobulated, and generally like a hot mess. Because when we give to others in wise ways, freely, of our own good wishes, that giving not only helps them; it helps us. As studies have shown, giving boosts your mood, improves your health, and makes you a generally more robust and joyful human.