I guess I thought for a long time that the home was like a prison-camp, because it was. There were certain feelings that weren’t allowed to be expressed.
I feel like in the last two years all I have been doing is holding up a sign like the one above and wondering if anyone would give me a response to my question. And that question would be: If you saw me here with this sign, what would you do for me?
This screen grab is actually from a Netflix show called The Kindness Diaries, which was modeled after The Motorcycle Diaries, the film featuring a fictional Che Guevara traveling on a motorbike and apparently able to do so based on the kind actions of others.
Anyway, from this still from Season 2 of the show– which I love, despite (or in spite of) its connotations of the generous white man giving to minorities around the world– which is very problematic. I like it because I feel sometimes like the one who is sitting on the floor, holding a sign. But instead of it saying ‘Habla Ingles?’ my sign has always said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing?’
And for some sick and inexplicable reason it has worked so far. It’s as if as soon as you open your mind and your heart and admit that you have no idea what you are doing, things start to happen.
But get this: The first thing you have to do is to actually get down on your knees (or your seat), and hold up the damned sign. I think you have to start from a place of humility, of not-knowing. And in many cases, of surrender.
It doesn’t matter what you’ve been doing before– or perhaps that’s key– that you were doing something that seemed significant in a worldly way before. And it has to be the process of finding that what you were doing before wasn’t totally working. And after deciding that, deciding to put that whole shebam on the line. And I’m willing to do that.
Anyway, The Kindness Diaries is on Netflix…. Lol.