2012 – The Year of Kindness

In the last month, as tradition would have it, I as many of us do prepared myself for a new beginning. Not just any new beginning, but a new year. Even though each day and each moment is a new opportunity to start anew, the New Year is a time that we globally agree to mark a new time, in our case, 2012.

As I recapitulate the significant events of my 2011, they range from starting new relationships to ending old habits to visiting Santa Fe to having a cup of tea by the ocean. In the last year, I was given many chances for great exploration and curiosity, and just as many chances to be courageous. I was given even more chances to fail, to try, to celebrate, to reevaluate, and to love unconditionally. During the last few minutes of 2011, I was deep in gratitude for have taken all of those chances in the last year. But as the clock waited to turn 2012 at midnight, my heart was yearning for something else. There was something I had forgotten along the way.

So my intention for 2012 is kindness, not resolution. A resolution to be kind to myself doesn’t seem as kind as setting an intention and cultivating it. This attention to kindness has been called from within and I know it is the only way to begin if I too want to be kind to others.

When I look back a year earlier to my first blog entry it reads, 2011 – The Year of Mystery.  If 2011 was the year of mystery then 2012 is the year of kindness. And last night, a little over a week into it, I already began to question if this is what kindness feels like, when I opened a book to find:

Kindness

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out in the day to mail letters and
 purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

What is your intention for 2012?

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