You shall do wrong unto others and others shall do wrong unto you. And these opposing wrongs will become your chains. The wrongs you have done unto others will be bound to you in the form of guilt, and the wrongs that others have done unto you in the form of indignation. The teachings of Jesus are there to free you from both. To free you from your guilt through atonement and from your indignation through forgiveness. Only once you have freed yourself from both of these chains may you begin to live your life with love in your heart and serenity in your step.
Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.
For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired? There is no kindness in paying a bill. There is no kindness in getting up at dawn to slop the pigs, or milk the cows, or gather eggs from the henhouse. For that matter, there is no kindness in making dinner, or in cleaning the kitchen after your father heads upstairs without so much as a word of thanks.
There is no kindess in lathcing the doors and turning out the light, or in picking up the clothes from the bathrrom floor in order to put them in the hamper. There is no kindness in taking care of a household because your only sister had the good sense to get herself married and move to Pensacola.
Nope, I said to myself while climbing into bed and switching off the light, there is no kindness in any of that.
For kindness begins where necessity ends.
When it comes to waiting, has-beens have had plenty of practice. Like when they were waiting for their big break, or for their number to come in. Once it became clear that those things weren’t going to happen, they started waiting for other things. Like for bars to open, or the welfare check to arrive. Before too long, they were waiting to see what it would be like to sleep in a park, or to take the last two puffs from a discarded cigarette. They were waiting to see what new indignity they could become accustomed to while they were waiting to be forgotten by those they once held dear. But most of all, they waited for the end.
At every step, there had been someone he could have asked for assistance, someone who could have eased his way by directing him to the right staircase, the right platform, the right train. Yet he had refused to ask a soul. With grim self-awareness, Emmett remembered how critical he had been of his father’s reluctance to ask the more experienced farmers around him for advice—as if to do so would somehow leave him unmanned. Self-reliance as folly.
He felt he understood why the people of New York walked with that purposeful agency. It was a dissuasive signal to the vagrants and drifters and the rest of the fallen.
If I learned anything in way, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—the moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on. The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.
I am of the opinion, Professor, that everything of value in this life must be earned. That it should be earned. Because those who are given something value without having to earn it are bound to squander it. I believe that one should have to earn respect. One should earn trust. One should earn the love of a woman, and the right to call oneself a man. And one should also earn the right to hope. At one time I had a wellspring of hope—a wellspring I had not earned. And not knowing what it was worth, on the day I left my wife and child, I squandered it. So over these past eight and half years, I have learned to live without hope, just as surely as Cain lived without it once he entered the land of Nod.
Now, in the strictest sense, this was not an honest claim. But while the Christian religion generally frowns upon the drinking of spirits, a sip of red wine in not only countenanced, it plays an essential role in the sacrament. And I figure that while the church generally frowns upon prevarication, a little white lying can be as Christian as the sip of Sunday wine, if performed in the service of the Lord.
Rather, the comfort of knowing one’s sense of right and wrong was shared by another, and thus was somehow more true.
When we’re young, so much time is spent teaching us the importance of keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit—a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, atrait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children—and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness. Just as someone can be too smart for their own good, there are those who are too patient for their own good, or too hardworking.
So I really couldn’t fault him for throwing some blame my way. That’s what rattled people do. The y point the finger. They point a finger at whoever’s standing closest—and given the nature of how we congregate, that’s more likely to be friend than foe.