I have been spending many hours of late diligently tapping away at these glyph coded keys, seeking to understand myself more thoroughly. It is with a reverence and respect for the words and the images they conjure that I undertake this practice. That reverence reaches beyond the words that I choose and the ideas that I attempt to seduce, to the readers who encounter my work.
I have recently made an effort to better understand the path that extends from consciousness to kindness. I have struggled with the idea that compassion might be a quality that has been breathed into this splendid universe, a quality that may even guide us into the future.
Not long ago a friend was suggesting that his belief in intelligent life forms living on other worlds was more certain than his belief in God. I suggested that if compassion was an ideal evolutionary trait, finding success and preserving itself in the rarified air of many different worlds, then it could be that evolution would eventually and inevitably lead to a species of benevolent gods. He quite liked this notion, and seemed to even increase his opinion of me once I had uttered it.
The savageness of humanity, I have concluded, is only to be expected, we are beasts after all. The natural fear and feeling of vulnerability that reasonably accompanies such a fragile and tentative existence is sure to stimulate such things. How else are we expected to live in this merciless world, if we are not prepared to defend what is ours?
Beyond this mercilessness though, the idea that our mammalian nature predisposes us to seek comfort in the warmth of another fascinates me. If you were lost with a stranger, or even someone you despised, in the deserts of northern Nevada, how late in the night would you allow your shivering to continue, before you accepted the comfort of their embrace?
It is as though the sensation of warmth, in a world that can coldly isolate, provides us a unique bit of relief. I have watched a mother goat or dog share the warmth of her body with her babies in a way that very much resembles human love. Is there any difference really, between the emotion she is sharing with them and the emotion we call love?
Is it in our self interest to be kind? Does it increase our power? Does it satisfy our drive to live? Or, is our biology an inhospitable climate for kindness? It could be that a desire to be kind is in fact an act of defiance.
Maybe the human animal has evolved through an age of internal revolution. That is to say, it could be that our biological will has been overthrown. Is there a parliament of reason in place where violent forces of nature once reigned? Has a civil society developed in a country that had been wild? Is being kind a product of this revolution of reason? Or does it emerge from a more primitive place in us?
Another question occurs to me: Is our desire to be kind comparable to other competing inclinations, or is kindness the default position? Meaning, absent any difficulty in one’s life, would there be a natural inclination to kindness? Is this the concept of Eden? The notion that, absent any survival pressures or conflict, a human being will be happy, well disposed and kind to others.
These are questions without answers, I understand that at least, but asking them leads me to draw several conclusions. First among them, being at all is a splendid thing, and being human is made all the more so by the complex miracle of reflection. In other words, thinking is a lovely thing indeed.
In addition to this satisfying bit of wisdom, I am further willing to conclude that love is a thing of warm blood and live birth. Love precedes reason. We did not learn to love, but love has cradled our learning.
I think that the warmth of the other, and the affection that accompanies it, is the origin of kindness. We seek to be recaptured by the care and comfort of those early moments of life. When faced with the harsh conditions of the cold world, we were warmed by the kindness which began as the milk of our mothers.