Kerri Power's Articles on Lions Roar

Kerri Power on the nature of real kindness. It started on a hike in the Adirondacks, during a summer without rain. The streams marked on our map were all dried up. Dave and I hiked for hours in the July heat, and the arguing got worse as our water got low. “We’re not going to have enough for the whole day,” I said. “Sure we will.” I stopped in a dry stream bed near a cluster of pines, and drained the dregs from my water bottle. The sun overhead shone directly in my eyes. “Dave, we have to get to the road and find somewhere to refill our bottles.” Dave waited ahead on the trail, frowning at his map. Strands of sandy hair stuck to his damp forehead. “No, we’re fine. Look, there’s another stream two miles ahead.” “But the last four have been dry. What if they’re all dry?” He looked up from the map and flashed his blue-eyed smile, the one that had charmed me so quickly when we first met. “Come on, I wanted to do three more peaks today. It’s not so far.” “That’s crazy. Please, can we just stop and find water? ” “I don’t want to stop now. You really can’t do this?” “No one can hike all day without water! We argued for several minutes. My head buzzed from the heat. I was exhausted from struggling like this over the simplest choices. Over the past two years our relationship had been punctuated by fights in which I became exasperated by his immovability, and my own anger at not feeling heard. If only he could be more loving, give me what I needed, then everything would be okay. Two years before, when I moved to New York from Canada, I thought I was a pretty kind person. I held doors, smiled at strangers. I was from St. John’s after all, where the bank teller you saw twice a year asked with heartfelt concern about your family and called you “ducky.” About two months after I arrived in the city, a well dressed man approached me in the subway station at Times Square and asked for directions to the 1-9 line, then decided to follow me home. “You’re going the wrong way,” I told him. “Your train is up those stairs.” “I want to come with you.” I walked around the subway station for five minutes trying to shake him, not wanting him to know which train I was getting on, let alone get on it with me. “No one smiles in this city,” he said, following me up a flight of stairs. He was a computer programmer living way out on Staten Island, and he was lonely. My smile had reminded him of someone. I wasn’t truly afraid – it was broad daylight after all, and people were passing us everywhere. He wasn’t acting threatening, just oddly enamored. “You’re so pretty, you must be Polish.” “You have to go back, this isn’t your platform.” We walked round and round, and finally I hopped on a train, I didn't even look to see if it was the right one, hoping to put an end to it. He was right at my heels. “Here’s my business card,” he said. “You see, I’ve got my own business.” The train was about to leave – we stood in the open doorway. Around us, people stood or sat in the subway car, wrapped in their own worlds. My heart was pounding. In a few seconds I would be traveling with this man, and then what? “You have to get off!” I said. I put my hand on his chest and shoved him backwards, so that he had to step off the train to keep his balance. In a moment of divine timing, the double doors closed between us. I remember his open mouth, the look on his face as the train pulled away. Most women in New York can tell similar stories of low-level threat, not always with such a benign ending. With so many people rubbing up against each other, every so often you end up on the radar of someone whose loneliness has nudged them past the boundaries of courtesy and reason. My roommate, a gregarious Greek-Canadian girl who had come to New York with the same internship program that brought me, was also followed on the subway in those early months. But in her case it happened at night and ended with the man holding her in a bear hug in the dark, three blocks from our apartment. “If you don’t let go, I’m going to scream!” she told him. But he just held her closer. “All I can hear is the beating of my heart,” he said. After several minutes of pleading she finally managed to break free and walked away, fast, without looking back. When she got to our apartment she was pale and shaking, her voice a whisper. When I refused to go on, Dave and I walked steaming out of the woods. We found a road marked on our map, and walked almost directly into an entrance gate of tall white columns. The columns were topped with a red sloped roof inscribed with lettering I didn’t recognize. Beyond, a clean white building with beautiful red trim sat amid sloping fields of green grass and trees. We wandered into the building and found several people scattered around a rambling kitchen and living area. As Dave went to find help, I watched the men and women talking and reading, washing dishes, preparing food together. Everyone spoke in low, calm voices. Dave found a young man with a goatee who agreed to drive us back to our car at the trail head. “What is this place?” I asked him. “It’s a Buddhist monastery. They give teachings here.” We followed him outside, and I looked back at the white walls, the yellow shutters. Warmth radiated through my body. I felt like someone had implanted a small, softly vibrating button in the middle of my chest. It was the most peaceful I’d felt in a long time. In those days I worked as a website manager at the United Nations. The organizations I worked for were created with the noblest of intentions – reducing the poverty and violence faced by women in developing countries. By their nature, they were staffed almost completely by women. They came from around the world – India, Kenya, Algeria, Lebanon, Brazil. Many had been leaders of women’s movements in their own countries or were scholars in gender studies. Some had risen from poverty or escaped child marriages. They were passionate women with a worthwhile cause. But there was a gap between the intention to do good, and the actual doing of it. One of the directors I worked under, a brilliant activist from Southeast Asia, moved through the office like a sharpened knife, brutally cutting down those whose efforts she found lacking, or who failed to rise to her level of vision. Once I overheard her condemning my boss, a warm-hearted American woman who was devoted to her. “She has absolutely no imagination,” the director scoffed to another woman, after my boss had left the room. In another organization, an academic from Turkey presided over an office of women who seemed to despise her and each other. Staff meetings were silent warfare, with the director speaking at length to a roomful of toxic stares, then being cut to shreds once she left the room. “These people have hated each other since they were born,” my colleague Maria said once. At the end of each day, I felt emotionally exhausted. My office friends and I joked that we were working to advance the human rights of women everywhere – except here in this office. My fellow intern, Ellen, was a smart, earnest girl from Ontario who planned to start her PhD the following year. She was excited to be working for the executive office, but was soon heartbroken to find that the director ignored her in meetings, and was nearly impossible to please. One lunch hour that winter, Ellen and I crossed 1st Avenue and climbed the stairs that led to the UN sculpture park bordering the East River. The director had declined Ellen’s request to write a reference letter. As we stood by the railing looking toward the river, cars whizzing past us on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive below, Ellen talked and cried. She wiped her cheek with her mitten, and tears slid over the woolen fibers like ice crystals. Part of me wanted to hug her, but I held back. I offered a few words, tried to be comforting. I knew how hard Ellen had tried to make her internship work. But I also felt a space between us that I didn’t know how to bridge, a reticence to really offer her my heartfelt compassion. And also a kind of cool superiority, that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t let myself fall apart like that. After the Adirondacks hike, I began to read books on Buddhism. I returned to the monastery to attend a beginner’s meditation retreat, and even sat for my own shaky daily meditations. Bit by bit, I became more aware of my anxious thoughts and the hold they had on me. I realized that Dave and I had drifted into a stalemate—each of us waiting for the other to make a move, each unwilling to be first to offer the love that was needed. One night, after Dave spoke harshly to me in front of friends, I said to him, “You’re not kind to me.” He stared at me, baffled. We lived in a four-story apartment building in Queens with a mix of old and young tenants. The oldest were Max and Selma, both ninety-two. What I remember is the smallness of them in the hallway, the way they clung to each other like leaves on a winter tree. Selma’s eyes were big with some long-held fear. We barely noticed them in our self-absorbed comings and goings, hauling groceries and laundry bags and bicycles. I don’t think we even talked about them, except to marvel at the low rent they must have paid, with rent control keeping rates down until a tenant moved. Early one Sunday our buzzer rang – a loud metallic crunch that started my heart racing, as buzzers and telephones so often do. Dave answered, and it was Selma in her robe, her wispy hair wild. Max had fallen out of bed. Could we help? Their apartment was dark and cluttered. Against one wall a stack of yellow newspapers curled under the weight of two umbrellas and a walking stick. A line of ceramic dogs gazed up from a glass cabinet, each perky nose holding a layer of dust. A crusty rubber hairbrush sat on stacks of opened mail. I followed dusty blue carpet to the bedroom, where the air was parched from the radiators. Max lay on his side by the bed, legs and arms out straight like a...

Web exclusive: No kindness wasted

TEACHINGS

LIFE

EXPLORE BUDDHISM

NEWS