148-31-06-2010

Being Remembered and Human Kindness

By W. Owen Thornton BA

Human kindness might be about being remembered.  If we do enough acts of human kindness, we might just be remembered in a positive manner.  The problem is I don’t know exactly how to behave in order to BE remembered, at least longer than a generation or two, but maybe, in some cases, being remembered for a generation or two IS enough.  Those who I remember with fondness made a human kindness difference in my life!

Many people who we remember beyond the two generation mark are remembered for the things other than acts of human kindness.  Take a look at those whose lives ended tragically, like Marilyn Munroe, or Buddy Holly: having an earlier than expected and tragic ending is one way of being remembered.  It doesn’t even seem to matter if death comes as a tragic suicidal overdose, which most would have a negative moral judgment against (and would make you think that you would forget such an individual), or if it was by accident:  all you have to have is a great deal of notoriety and some level of talent and die young … and you are remembered long after most “normal” folk.  And you have notorious folk who are also remembered, like Hitler and Stalin.  We remember these folk for the human carnage they invoked on human kind.  These things reveal something else about us too … that we seem to remember those who have done great evil more so than those who have done great positive things.  What we focus on, and why we seem to remember negative things over the positive is a good topic for another article, eh?

I myself don’t seem to have a human kindness hero.  I don’t think about them or him or her at all.  If pressed to come up with a human kindness hero, I might come up with names like Ghandi or Mandela.  But these are the names of extraordinary people in extraordinary times.  What is left for the rest of us who are not necessarily so heroic, or who definitely do not grow up in extraordinary situations?  Like me.  I’m a spoiled white guy growing up in Canada, a privileged nation where the most we worry about is a 17% increase in electricity charges.  Were I to look at things a little closer or rather, to put things into perspective, I live in a place where getting a stable supply of electricity is taken for granted.  There are many places in the world, that were I to even live in a locale where electricity was delivered, it would be doubtful that I would have the financial wherewithal to even own something to plug into a socket!

The only thing I can do to find a real human kindness mentor, it to look back at other ordinary folk whom I knew years ago (I’m 48) and examine their lives to see what about them I remember. 

Granny

I only had one grandparent whom I can remember.  Such is the way of things when you are born a half generation out of sync with the world: all your “generation before” relatives are nearly your contemporary friend’s grandparent’s age.  My granny died when I was 11.  Of her, I remember that she had time for me.  She had time to play cards.  We played rummy and two-handed euchre by the hour.  I do believe she enjoyed playing cards with me.  She was well into her eighties when I knew her, and you might think for someone her age that playing with a child … the years that I can remember, say from aged 6 to 11, might have been extremely boring.  But she had fun and I delighted in playing cards with her.  We played simple games, and I remember winning as much as losing, so we were evenly matched and we never tired of one another.

So there you go: I do know one thing that you can do to be remembered, at least by two generations of folk you leave behind.  (I am two generations away from granny, remember!)  Being remembered through acts of human kindness is simply done by taking time out of your life to do things with others … to do things they would like to do … to do things that may not be your favorite thing, but something that you can simply do to show that you care and care deeply.  I think card-playing with Granny was a great act of human kindness that keeps her memory alive inside of me.

Mom

I think the thing I remember most about my mom is a single image that has at least two human kindness connotations.  I remember her turning away from the kitchen countertop to look at me after she was done some element of preparing the evening dinner.  As she turned she would often be wiping her hands on a towel or maybe on her apron (whatever happened to aprons?).  She would be turning to face me to answer a question or to simply talk to me.  She would talk to me with her back to me while she lovingly prepared a meal.  And she would turn to look at me regularly in order to impress upon me that she loved me, that she loved to talk to me, that she loved having me around to talk to while she prepared that meal for me.

I don’t think that mom talking to me as she prepared dinner is any kind of heroic thing in heroic times … but as a simple act of human kindness it means a great deal to me.  It was a huge thing that helps me remember her.  And this would be what I would have passed on to my children, had I had any.  So, Mom’s simple act of human kindness, of preparing a dinner and talking to me while she did it, this is the kind of thing that allows people to be remembered for acts of human kindness.  It was a huge act of human kindness that has helped make me who I am … a person who has done so very little for others, other than, perhaps, helping to remind upwards of 50 people or so on a very limited email newsletter about human kindness.

Mom’s talking to me and preparing dinner said that I was worthy of talking to … that I was someone worthy of preparing a dinner for.  In the Christian church, emphasized much by Jesus, there’s this little-known thing called hospitality which was so very important in ancient times.  Inviting someone into your home and putting on the nines in order to make someone feel special was a regular occurrence.  We do so little of that now, in these hectic times.  This is a factual statement as found in Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone: we have far fewer dinners with family and friends than we did in the 1950s.  We always think that the future brings about better times, but in the case of dining together and talking to one another, I’m not sure things have been made better.

So there are two other things that can help you to be remembered for acts of human kindness.  Talk and listen to someone is the first.  Listen, rather than hear them. Listening means listening in order to better understand them.  Listening means thinking about questions that will help you better understand what you are listening too.  People do things with others who are important to them so “who questions come first.”  “Who did you do that with?  Who was there with you?”  What and how are the next type of questions that make you a good listener.  Here you learn about how to water ski, or what it’s like to go camping with a family for two weeks at a time.  Lastly, ask the why question.  By the time you’ve gotten through all the answers to the previous questions you know them well enough to ask the personal “WHY?”  "Why" is about why someone does something at all.  It targets their essence … something that should not be asked until you are comfortable with them … until you have invested a lot of other listening before you ask that why question.  Why questions might imply that it doesn’t make sense for people to do that sort of thing … it might be about a judgment against that sort of action … so WHY questions need to be asked out of deepest sincerity. 

"Hearing" people is far different from "listening" to them.  "Hearing" means thinking about what you want to say about yourself or what you want to say in response to what they have said.  A hearing conversation might go something like:

“What did you do this weekend?”

“We went water skiing with friends.”

“Really?  I went to the family cottage with friends too.”

Lest you think this last comment is about making a “listening” connection, “IE.  Going away with friends,” it is not.  It is a hearing roadblock comment.  It says, if you didn’t want to know about what I did on the weekend, and all you wanted to tell me was what you wanted to do on the weekend, why did you bother asking me?  A better “listening” response would have been, “Who did you go water skiing with?”

So if human kindness, at least in our normal, every-day world is about being remembered, then take time for others by doing something they like to do with them, listen effectively, and break bread together.  People who do these things will be remembered far longer than those who do not.  And the common, every-day sort of people we remember will be remembered for the human kindness things they do and … they make the world a better place every moment they live.  You can be someone to be remembered in a positive manner, via human kindness.

Cheers and God Bless

Owen Thornton