When I thought of the name flowjournals I thought about flow, yes, but I also wanted to write about kindness. To me, they seem linked. In neither case are we pre-occupied with self, what others think of us. Flow is perhaps more emotionally neutral, whereas kindness is about positive affect, and yet, in flow, positive affect is created through absorption, although the effect is mostly felt by the person in flow only. In kindness, there is flow between any number of people, a river of wellbeing.
Yet, like mindfulness and flow, kindness very difficult to write about. Slippery. Perhaps it’s a case of writing towards kindness, towards this quality that dissolves self and other and difference of kinds without erasing it.
Kindness is not a terribly showy thing. It’s not sexy or glamorous, but everyone, even the psychopath who doesn’t seem to know how to behave kindly, is craving it, knowingly or unknowingly. I saw that in Werner Herzog’s film on Death Row years ago when one of the prisoners, James Barnes, a serial killer of women, is told that his abusive father ‘loved’ him despite his crimes. This man, apparently so disconnected from any sense of compassion or empathy, begins to weep, and we see the child rise up in the face of the killer, the need for kindness that was never met. Perhaps only for a moment, but it’s there, and is enough to demonstrate how deep that need for kindness runs.