Christmas, Courage and Kindness

Christmas is here again with all its consumerist excitement.
It's tempting to throw yourself into it.
To believe for just a few short weeks that the world is simply full of joy and love and lots of mulled wine.
It's tempting to look at the excited faces of the Father-Christmas-believing children and say "Santa Claus is coming to town."
It's tempting to sit at your work Christmas dinner and soak up the alcohol-drenched 'Joy-to-the-world," ambiance.
It's tempting to join in with the familiar carols, the tunes  that take us back to a a better time.
"Peace on Earth and mercy mild."

Whatever  happened to that?

While all around us the storm clouds are gathering, we hang on to our glitter-filled, bauble- shaped dreams and hope that by hanging them on our Christmas trees, the world become a better place.

We have to keep hoping, right?

last night I helped at a Christmas party for students with special needs coming home for Christmas. 
 It was organised by our daughter, Mia.  
She found the hall, the DJ, sent persuasive texts to friends, siblings ( and her brother Joss) and together they created a magical night.
There were traumas, there was dancing, there was much flirting.
Like any home coming friendships had to be retrieved and re-shaped and re-kindled.
And they were.

And at the end of the evening, one of the mums came up to Mia and said:
"Thank you, you have done something amazing tonight because it was done  out of pure kindness."
That meant a lot to Mia.
But I think it might have meant even more to me.
Like a wake-up call, I felt those words send a shock through my body and 
wrap themselves around my heart.
" Pure kindness," - how often are our actions shaped by that?
How often do we do something that is purely kind?

In the crazy, frightening, divisive world, I think we might have forgotten how to do it.
And yet it takes so little..
Pure kindness doesn't need a hall or a DJ or a sound system.
It doesn't come with  a price tag or a money-back guarantee or a present receipt.
You should expect no thank you letter.
it's not tangible or concrete.

But all the same, I think it might be the greatest gift we can give..

It's a gift that can take courage and thought and time.
It's a gift is easy to forget about or hide right at the bottom of the pile.
It's a gift that is impossible to wrap.
But it's not what it looks like that matters.
In the end, pure kindness is the light that can guide us through these zig-zagging days of distrust and darkness because no one can stop us from making it shine.

I think it might be our most powerful weapon in these days of growing hate and injustice.
i say, this year, let's give pure kindness a go.
.
So Happy Christmas/ Holidays/ Days off work - and here's to next year being everything that this year wasn't.

Here's to 2017 being the year we find the courage to be truly kind.

It's Not Fair That It's Not fair.

So, I was sitting in a grid-locked traffic jam, a trail of unmoving red tail lights in front of me,  rows of unblinking headlights behind.

And I couldn’t help railing against the injustice of it all. 

I had been to visit a student on placement 30 miles away.

Not only had it taken up most of the day but while I was there I got a  £70 parking ticket .

 And now, here I was stuck in a never-ending traffic jam, getting later and later for my next meeting.

It wasn’t even slightly fair.

I wanted to yell at someone.

I wanted to fume and let steam flow from my ears.

And then, on the radio came Steve Hewlett - broadcaster, journalist, film maker - 
And he was talking with  stoic cynicism about his fight with cancer.

Sharing with such honest humour his painful, uncomfortable journey.

Accepting  with such  courage the future of  his now time-limited life….

And I knew, that what was happening to him was so, so much worse than my semi-wasted day and my parking ticket and my grid-locked evening.

I knew that to be diagnosed with aggressive cancer when you are mid-successful career with two kids, that is just not fair.

It is so much less fair than what was happening to me.

It’s a whole a whole other universe of unfair.

And knowing that should have put my day into perspective.

I should have calmly accepted that my frustration and sense of injustice was as nothing in comparison.

But…I just couldn’t.

Now, not only was I cross about the injustice of my day, but I felt guilty about feeling cross about it, which made even crosser.

Apparently there is a hierarchy to injustice.

And in the scheme of things, a parking ticket, a long day and tardiness for a meeting come right at the bottom.

The world is full of actual heart-wrenching, painful, mind-blowingly real injustice.

When you think about it, nothing in life is fair.
It's not fair that we have to grow old.
It's not fair that we watch those we love suffering.
It’s not fair that in some parts of the world people are starving while I scrape my leftover dinner into the bin.

It’s not fair that nations are awash with hatred and prejudice and war.

It’s not fair that the greatest amount of power seems to be held in the hands of a few self-absorbed despots. 

It’s not fair that almost everything that is good about the world seems to be hidden by almost everything that is bad.

It’s not fair that 90% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of less than 10% of the world’s population

It’s not fair that thousands of children die each day because they are too poor to live.

Nothing in this life is fair.

We learn that at a young age.

“It’s not fair,’ seems to be one of the first phrases that children learn to say.
And I'm almost jealous of their black-and-white certainty that it really isn't fair

For them there is no league of fairness.

When they believe something is unfair, it really is.

It’s not fair that they have to share toys, eat vegetables, go home, stop playing, go to bed……it’s just NOT FAIR

Our toddlers struggling to make sense of the world are lucky..

They haven’t yet learnt the annoyingly awful truth that every moment of every day someone has it much, much worse than them.

They can have terrible, screaming tantrums because their parents won’t buy them the latest flashing, battery driven toy or the  chocolate biscuits they saw on the shop shelves. 

They can shout and kick and hit in the absolute belief that nothing is as unfair as what is happening to them.

Don’t you sometimes wish you were still a toddler, so certain of your absolute right to be indignant and outraged?

Truthfully, I would have loved to have sat in my car in that traffic jam ranting and raving on that grid-locked evening.

But I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t let my inner toddler  out.

I am burdened by the knowledge that what I considered unfair that day wouldn’t even register on a generic barometer of injustice.

And so I tried to breathe slowly and go to my happy place, somewhere full of sunshine  and gin and chocolate.

But even there, inside my head, a little chocolate-filled voice was whispering:

“but a whole day, a parking ticket, a traffic jam…..it’s just not fair.

And yet,  here’s the thing.

A sense of injustice, of indignation at all that is unfairly wrong with the world, seems to be part of the human condition.

We are good at being victims. at blaming others, at explaining that it is not our fault.

But sitting in the car, staring helplessly at the unending trail of red tail-lights, I realised something: there is a purpose to our sense of injustice.

A reason why we feel angry about all that is out-of-our-control-wrong with the world.

If we didn’t feel angry, we would never try and do anything about it.

It’s ok to be a little bit cross if something is a little bit unfair – as long as we get very cross if something is incredibly and hugely unfair.

If we don’t get cross about the little things, how are we ever going to get cross enough about the bigger ones.

Anger can be a catalyst.

Seeing red, tail lights and all, can be the difference between apathy and action, between doing nothing and doing something.

And if those of us for whom life is generally fair enough don’t act, who will?

“Are you a glass-half- full or a glass-half-empty-person?” people sometimes ask me.

“ I’m more of a why-does-it-matter-how-full-the-glass-is -let’s-just-drink-up-and-do something-about-it person,” I say.

And I hope that’s true.

I hope I’m brave enough to fight injustice with actions as well as words.

I hope I have courage enough to stand up and battle for all that I believe is right and good in the world.
I hope I will never let evil triumph by doing nothing.

I hope I never stop feeling angry about how unfair life is.

So the next time I am stuck in an unmoving, never-ending traffic jam, at the end of a day that has probably not even been unfair enough to be unfair, I'm going to get really cross.

I’m going to bang my hands on the steering wheel,.

I'm going to rant and rave at the injustice of it all.
I'm going to eat all the bits of old chocolate I can find.
I'm going to swear and curse  at anyone who looks at me.
And I'm not going to feel even slightly bad about it.

Because  I'll be doing it all to make the world a better place...won't I?