The Year of Kindness

We don't do new year resolutions in my family. We don't know what, exactly we do for New Year's yet, but we don't do resolutions. My favorite tradition we tried out was end of 2020; we held a ceremony late on the evening of Dec 31st and wrote down the things we wanted to leave behind in 2020. (A bit like a Petersmith Burning Man.) It was refreshing. I took it seriously, and it affected me deeply.

End of 2021, we did it differently. We set intentions coming into the year. Mine was Kindness. I wanted to, by the end of 2022, be able to be kind to More (types of people, animals, and forms of life) and More Deeply kind (meeting them on terms they valued). Call it two axes of kindness. Both of these dimensions require increased awareness of life around me.

As I set out on this journey, I was fortunate enough to receive some wisdom: 'Start with learning to be kind to yourself.' Obviously me being who I am, I completely ignored this and plowed headlong into Learning. I charged into fields, forests, and waters to seek more awareness. (Only partly kidding - I recognized self-kindness would be part of it. In all honesty, I didn't quite know how to be more kind to myself, so I did the other, as a start.)

I started with learning to be kind to More. (Bit of background: last year I spent a lot of time reading about trees. Trees are rad! In 2021 I read The Overstory, an incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about trees. Without ruining it (please read this book), one of the stories author Richard Powers weaves together is eco terrorists and how a (semi-fictional?) group of eco-terrorists became radicalized.

(At least 'eco terrorism' is how they were framed to me back in the early 1990s.... As I was reading this book, I kept marveling at how much I related to them - radicalization seems a natural reaction to me today, in reaction to how we treat trees. This realization was a wonderful thing; I had all but resigned that I was well on my way to becoming The Man, and was delighted to feel some F Them rebellion bubbling up.)

Back to it, though. One of the (semi-fictional?) botanists from The Overstory presents a theory of trees as much more sentient than I understood previously; how they're able to communicate with each other through chemical and electrical signals, for example. Able to support each other, of existing with awareness of each other. Wild.

Again being me, I went around telling absolutely everyone I knew about this book. Thankfully, I made a delightful friend last year who is WAY more into books than I am. Walking around his house is so fun - books are literally piled on every available surface - a real intellectual playground. There I was, telling him about how deeply affected by this novel I was. Upon hearing me out, he gently walked me over to his pile of books about trees - my dear friend has a WHOLE PILE OF BOOKS dedicated to the topic of trees. What a beautiful thing.

He started me with The Wild Trees (Richard Preston, an instant Top Five book I've ever read, on the inspiring weirdos who made it their life's work to climb and study the world's tallest trees, mostly set in the 1970s), and Heartbeat of Trees (Peter Wohlleben, the same author of the much more controversial The Hidden Life of Trees). These books confirmed for me that I hadn't been paying enough attention to trees. If you don't already know how trees get water from the ground to their canopy, I highly recommend some time spent researching Capillary Action. My god, trees are fascinating. Anyhow, my growing fascination with trees was a direct input to my desire to learn to be kind to More.)

I started my pursuit of learning to be kind to More out in nature. Since the pandemic started, I had developed a daily habit of spending a couple hours hiking around the eucalyptus and cypress forests around my house. Most of my initial journey was pure awareness; using my senses to become more deeply aware. Looking close enough to see the seemingly endless variations of green and brown, taking time to smell and observe how trails evolved with moisture, or without. And how the more I listened, the more life I could hear and become aware of (trees cracking, endless birds calling, and my favorite: at a certain point before dusk, a chorus of owls majestically hooting to each other).

It wasn't long before I started to flip my perception of life, and who's in charge. Without dwelling on it, I needed to shed some of my perception that mankind is the ultimate form of life. Then I was able to understand all the earth's resources aren't here to serve solely us. This perspective opened up entire new paths of understanding. Especially when I started to learn about fungi and how accounted for as one ever-evolving body, fungi is easily the oldest and most sustained force of life on this planet. Everything I was seeing, smelling, hearing, and feeling would figure out a way to keep existing long after my body fails, and my soul goes wherever unbound souls go. I find comfort in this awareness.

(Side note on death - isn't it wild with all our knowledge and advancement we still have zero understanding what happens after life?)

I was surprised how quickly kindness became about the resources we were consuming. (Silly me, I entered this year with some part of me assuming I would literally be hugging trees...) I could be kind to More as a starting point by reducing my consumption. Right around the time I was learning this, we were about to start a new deck project. Our old deck was nothing great to look at, and was rotting in some parts. We had been planning for a new deck for months.

I began to question whether we needed a new deck. I began to think not everything continually needs improving.

We ended up finding enough sustainably sourced wood to do the deck; I planted an early marker of my progress that it physically pained me to think about majestic redwoods being cut down so we could have a new deck. I can't say I've ever felt that way about a decision.

This breadth of awareness spread to living things. I learned to pay particular attention to spiders, and moths, and ants; anything that crawled I'd generally ignored before this year. This year I learned to admire their fight for survival, and feel connected to them in this. I became more aware of their ecosystem, of their food sources, and struggles.

One of the biggest growths I went through was with how I related to different types of people. Specifically people I used to dismiss, or bind in categories and interact with (or ignore) accordingly. It wasn't hard to take the connection I was discovering with creepy crawly beings and see so much commonality with fellow humans.

Something amazing and unexpected started to happen. I began to focus on the best parts of people rather than the worst. I started to see people as who they were striving to be much more than what was holding them back. With this, I began to experience so much less conflict. Grace began to crowd out friction. Learning to be kind to More has altered my life in this way.

Kindness to More was a cycle of more awareness leading to broader understanding, which allowed me to learn how to be More Deeply kind. In order to meet other living things on terms they understand and value I sought to understand them.

A big motivation for this axis is our new puppy, Moby. I wanted to have a deeper relationship with him than I'd had with previous pets. This year, this meant a whole lot of play. When Moby wants to play, he makes no secret of it. He hunches down, drops his head, and stares really intently. It's very intense, almost-glowering in a way, but without the threat. In a naughty / ready-to-pounce way. It's wonderful.

There are two not-incredibly-convenient times Moby gets most playful - just after his breakfast (when we're typically scrambling to get the kids up, fed, and out the door for school), and late in the evening (when we're often winding down from full days). This is the first lesson I learned about being More Deeply kind to others - it's on their terms. This requires a temporary putting away of my own interests and feelings.

There's a very strong thread I learned this year striving to be more kind to Moby and being more kind to my five-year-old. He, also, values a ton of play. This meant a lot of pushing through tiredness and sickness, giving what I had to give; it was a lot of battling imaginary baddies and navigating fantastical scenarios. It also meant many nights laying with him an extra half hour to help him fall asleep.

I was able to change my perspective this year. Rather than begrudgingly giving him another half hour of my time, I started to take the opportunity of another half hour to watch him fall asleep. He won't be this little forever. I locked in so many more memories of him in his bed, passing from restless to exhausted, and finally giving over to sleep. As my friend Peter-Ryan Kershaw has said, I need to understand where to file a formal Thank You because I somehow ended up as the luckiest person on earth to get to have these memories.

It was different with our eight-year-old. She wants us to value her privacy and space. She is perfectly able to come find us when she needs us. She'll reach out from the inner world of her thoughts to ask about a song we're listening to, or with something on her mind. (I love when she does this. I find her mind utterly fascinating.). Kindness to her seems to be understanding how she wants to be treated, and meeting her on her terms.

Kindness to our chickens became more food scraps, which they devour immediately. For our bees, I became a better beekeeper. I learned how to proactively manage mites and was better at hive inspections. (I think) I became a better husband and partner this year. I pulled more weeds without being asked; I needed less.

And I did end up learning to be kinder to myself. This was easily the most uncomfortable learning of the year. I learned I can frame kindness to any other living being as a service, and find honor in that. Before I could feel fully comfortable giving myself kindness, I had to understand I was worth kindness. (This was embarrassing and hard for me to confront.)

I started by grabbing rest when I needed it. This felt forced and more like an intellectual exercise - 'rest when you're tired' sounds simple, but more difficult in practice. I found it difficult to actually rest when the kids are screaming and I start to think about my wife dealing with them after a long day of her own and begin to question whether I 'needed' rest or 'preferred' rest.

When I returned from a summer sabbatical (a life-altering road-trip to BC), I was so desperate to hold on to the ephemeral bliss I was experiencing that I did something I wouldn't have normally. I allowed myself to be selfish and not allow others' anxieties to affect me. I began to learn maybe it wasn't selfish at all (maybe actually just healthy?) to separate the experience others are having from my own. To not be brought down by others.

A big part of this year was learning the limits of my ability to be kind to myself. I learned I am afraid of becoming lazy, or complacent. I learned this fear overwhelms my incentive to cut myself some slack. Given the choice between tackling a chore or resting, I tilt heavily towards the chore. The more often I choose the chore, the less likely I turn into a lazy asshole. (I don't want to be a lazy asshole.) This is where I am today, and I understand I still have a long way to go on this journey of self-kindness.

I had a moment later in the year where the two axes of kindness collided. On my daily hike with the pup, we headed up the hillside through a eucalyptus forest. (Eucalyptus: beautiful to look at, delicious smelling, and also invasive. And, due to their great height, a threat (fires, felling).

Planted largely in the same era, most of the eucalyptus in our community is reaching the end stages of life. They are heavily monitored and aggressively removed at the first sign of threat to fall. They grow tall enough to easily take out a house or worse if that would happen.)

So we were on a hike, Moby and I, and he's been a good boy and getting much better at recall, so we've grown more comfortable having him off leash (which is awesome). We're hiking, he's off leash, it's dusk; it's beautiful. The birds were out in full song. We reached the top of the forest and saw almost an entire stand of trees had been cut down.

I stopped in my tracks. I felt the heaviness of the moment, the awareness. Time slowed down. I noticed the smell first - I love the smell of eucalyptus. Even in that moment, as I was trying to observe and honor the loss of life, the first thing that hit me was the bright, minty smell of eucalyptus.

I don't know how long it was until I started mourning, but that was next. I stood surrounded by the freshly sawed trunks, which were still white and green. I noticed the forest was brighter with more light coming through, and I realized they were gone. They wouldn't ever be back in my lifetime.

The first part of my journey with kindness this year was learning to be kind to More. Trees were my starting point, but standing in the sawdust, I realized I didn't really understand how to be kind to a tree. I was aware of them, I was doing my best to honor them, but had no idea of the value of this honor and intention.

Right then I realized this year - all of it - ended up being about learning to be kinder to myself. I'd set out on the year intending to learn to be kind to More, and More Deeply kind to those I was aware of. But I took away so much more than I gave (and I gave more this year than ever). I was calmer and more focused, more present, more at peace than any other year of my life. I experienced less conflict, I connected with people I wouldn't normally have previously. I was a better dad than I've ever been. A better beekeeper, a better friend. I saw the best in people.

Today, I am more aware of utter beauty, everywhere.

Son of a bitch, I Mr. Miyagi'd myself.

Right in the midst of focusing on my limitations of self-kindness, I had this awareness. This year was a journey of self-kindness. To grow in these ways was the biggest kindness I'd ever done for myself. I deeply love who I've become; what is more self-kind than that?

As we are hurtling towards another end of year, I don't know what ceremony awaits us. Maybe it doesn't matter. I already know the next step in my journey is becoming a better listener. Stay tuned.