Creating Kindness

Something I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately is kindness and its value in our world. We all have a need for community, a yearning to express ourselves and feel loved and understood. I was planning to begin writing a series that took kindness as its topic, exploring the little concrete ways we can increase the presence of kindness in our daily lives. However, in light of the current state of things and social distancing measures, our capacity for kind acts might seem to be diminished. How can we show kindness when we can only see each other from afar?

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The Littleness of Life

If something small is capable of bringing you happiness – let it. Be in that moment, imagining this little joy can fill you up. Allow it to matter.

Don’t dismiss it as meaningless, trivial, or not enough. It is enough for this present, and doesn’t need to be more. The next moments will bring their own meaning – their own sorrows and joys – and you will be able to handle them when they come, but not before.

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Waiting for Birds

There is something so beautiful and small about feeding the birds. I paused on my walk through the woods and stretched out my hand. In the distance, both in front and behind, the sound of children’s laughter and crunching of crisp snow echoed along the otherwise secluded path. 

I raised my hand a little higher. The little black seeds stood out against my open palm, an offering extended freely. The sun filtered through the spindly branches and cast shadows: those little strips of light were painting the snow. I looked up.

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Wonder

What is the value of wonder?

This is something I have been reflecting on lately, and the idea was brought into sharper focus when I was running along my usual route. The path beside the water was dappled with winter – there were icy patches in the pavement cracks and streaks of frost on the grass. But the landscape was not yet consumed by winter’s silence: it was still alive and visible beneath this surface layer of cold and snow. The water was also not subdued: it moved with great freedom, waves that rolled in sharpened wind. 

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The Free Heart

Knowledge and power:
The words that would
supply us with lies
about what it means to be human
Telling us the things we should
reach out, to hold, to have

To succeed and to live
The good life
is to follow the logic of more
To do and to take
To give and to make
And in the good work
that is measured above
is found the good life
that is foreign to love

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Arrival

Warning: This review contains some spoilers, so only read on if you have already seen the movie, or don’t mind finding out some revelations of the plot.

Science fiction is not a genre with which I have much familiarity, and for the most part I avoid it in favour of other movies. Arrival, however, defied both my expectations and what I thought of before as typical conventions, and I think of it now as a film universal in its scope and its reach. This film could be described in so many ways, since the number of its themes continues to expand the longer I reflect. But to me, I think of Arrival most of all as a beautifully filmed meditation on life, on language and on unity.

I suppose that doesn’t really help in narrowing it down, so I’ll try to be a little more specific. The movie follows a linguistics professor, Louise, (played by Amy Adams) at a time of great global upheaval, after a series of spacecraft have landed at various locations around the world. Louise is tasked with decoding the language of these alien creatures aboard the spacecraft; they communicate, however, through symbols rather than through the spoken word. Over the course of the film, a number of flashbacks are interwoven amid the narrative, which are eventually revealed to be flashforwards, reflecting in a mysterious way the nonlinearity of time as experienced by the aliens and, through their intervention, by Louise as well. These short vignettes of Louise’s future life with her daughter were beautiful glimpses of the ordinariness of life, in which the surrounding sounds of nature were crisp and clear, and infused with peace.
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