Human Kindness Can Be About Signs

By W. Owen Thornton

Today’s topic on Human Kindness explores practicing human kindness towards your “self” … and then to others. I have been having many conversations lately about signs … the kind that may be directing you towards having a better life for your “self”. I’ll begin by defining them, and citing some examples. Then I’ll write about “seeing/hearing” them, doing something about them, and last I’ll focus on how we can be positive “human kindness signs” for others.

In the movie Bruce Almighty, staring Jim Carey, there’s a scene where Bruce is praying to God asking for a sign. “What should I do, God?” A city work truck cuts him off and on the back of it are a bunch of exposed signs saying things like “wrong way”, “stop”, “do no enter” etc. But all Bruce sees is the annoying truck that’s just pulled in front of him. In addition to pulling in front of him, it is also impeding his progress to going … really … nowhere. At this time in the movie Bruce has no destination. I’m thinking here of the Beatles Song, “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”

Signs can be that direct.  Ironically enough, even when we’re asking to see them, we can still miss them. Signs can be flashes in your head, pictures of dreams that you don’t know how to fulfill. I’ll call these signs internal ones because they come from within. There are also external signs. They can be comments someone says like, “Why do you stick with that job?” or “I have a friend who may be able to help you out.” Or “You’ve changed lately. Is anything going on that you want to talk about?” I have a fortune cookie taped to my computer monitor that I received before going back to school that reads, “Excellent chance for future success” and now I’m nearly finished my Masters in Philosophy and I’ll be going off to McMaster for Ph.D. work in the fall. Signs often hit us at moments when we cannot see the forest for the trees. It can be like this: You know your refrigerator is dying though it still works, but it’s a hassle to go out looking and you really don’t want to spend the money. So you pretend to ignore the situation. You don’t see the advertisements for refrigerator sales (signs) until the day it breaks … and then you’re desperate to get a new fridge.

For me, in going back to school in philosophy I kept having these wistful visions of how much I enjoyed the university classroom. I loved the lectures, the setting … the entire experience. But I couldn’t act on those images. I told myself that they were wistful fantasies of a time long gone. It was a ‘reasonable’ explanation for a person whose career was faltering and had been for some time. I think those images, those fond remembrances, had many things going for them so that I couldn’t act upon my own internal signs. I thought I was looking back at university with rose-coloured glasses … that it wasn’t as much fun as I remembered. I thought it was foolish and selfish to think about going back to school when I was “supposed” to be of working age. Going back to school felt like it was out of the synch with a cultural pattern. You go to school when you’re young. You work when you’re older. So the sign “feels” wrong, even when there is no stigma about going to school at any age.

Many people I know are at a stage in their lives when they are changing careers, or changing work locations or they are stepping up into supervisory roles. Many say they are doing so after having failed to read the signs for so long. Some have stopped climbing the work ladder and are stepping back from the corporate model of success. The sign? High blood pressure, excessive stress … panic attacks … all of which were signs that finally cut through the clatter of their own self-talk and allowed them to examine their situation so that they could make the change.

And therein lies something important … something completely intangible … finding ourselves in a position to allow ourselves to finally see/hear or read the signs. I cannot say how it comes about where people can finally allow themselves to read the signs whereby they find the power to actually do something about it. Letting signs crack through our own egotistical barriers of our own ability to “know-how” may be the trickiest part of signs. It may be something that I cannot explain. Certainly for anyone who had an annual check-up and who received high blood pressure pronouncements were able to read that sign. But for others, sometimes the situation never gets bad enough. What I can tell you is how I finally recognized my internal signs as something important. Now I recognize them in hindsight … but maybe signs have the power to change us in mysterious ways that allow us to finally come into alignment with the direction the signs are telling us to go.

As I said, two things were happening to me at once. I was having these internal images of how much I loved going to the University of Western Ontario.  In the midst of my freelance writing business tanking I would fondly look back at those days as the best of my “doing” life. I say “doing” life because I include doing school work and doing “work” work in the same category here. I loved doing the work of studying and learning and reading and writing. (Though I admit I hate writing exams!) I always felt that university was a dynamic, “alive” place that I had loved being a part of. But there was no way to get back there … or so I thought. And my freelance career was going south for two reasons. First, the local newspaper and magazine market had coalesced into one huge conglomerate that didn’t take as much freelance writing and my business writing was suffering because businesses felt they didn’t need print newsletters when they could do something on their own by creating an interactive web page.

It’s fascinating how an act of kindness to the world, helped me along the way. What I’m about to reveal is one way that we might be able to come to hear or see or read those signs: do that which comes naturally to you and you and your signs may just find they unite. I have long felt that the world has become too harsh, that it has forgotten the days of the barn-raising: where the entire community came together to build someone a barn … because … everyone knew that one day they might need everyone else to help them do that which they couldn’t achieve on their own, like take in the fall harvest because they had fallen ill or some such thing. And so I wanted to write about human kindness. I did so both selflessly and selfishly because I knew if I did anything to make the world more kind: the world might become kinder towards me.

So I began doing that which I had always done: I wrote. But this time I wrote about something I was passionate about: human kindness. Writing about something I am passionate about was one thing I hadn’t done much of in my entire non-fiction writing career. Assignments for magazines were often redirected away from what you wanted to write and some business work was just that: business work, but there wasn’t an opportunity to put your heart and soul into it. So I took a risk and purchased a web blog and dug in. I quickly found myself dancing around philosophical matters … which I didn’t even know were philosophical matters at the time … of metaphysics, epistemology and especially applied ethics. Suddenly that which I had wanted to do was becoming problematic: I was dishing out wisdom that I didn’t think I was educated enough to dish.

Next thing I found myself doing was calling the Mature Student Advisor at UWO to talk about taking some psychology and some sociology courses so I could write better articles for the www.humankindnessproject.com . I wasn’t certain I was going to go back to school but I at least wanted to explore my options. I had found a way to mesh my fantasy of being in a university classroom with the reality of writing what I wanted to write about. Somehow, my internal signs had guided and directed me to do that which I had wanted to do for years. Where I hadn’t been able to give myself permission to return to school for years, now, suddenly I found it.

That mature student advisor was the perfect person for me to have met. We connected on a multitude of levels including the fact that she was of the same faith in the same denomination … and that’s something that it would have come up in conversation and because Presbyterians are approximately one percent of the national population. She guided me not to psychology and sociology, but to philosophy. My first professor was brilliant and made the subject come alive. When my first essay was due, I found the only person on campus who could help me write better essays and I received the best grades I had ever received during my entire academic career. Somewhere in there I received that fortune cookie I told you about earlier, “Excellent chance for future success.” The signs were everywhere and I missed most of them on the first pass … but that didn’t stop them from guiding me beyond my own “self” non-awareness.

So, in the end, when it comes to signs, I think there are only two things we can attempt to do. One, we need to pay attention. When you find yourself thinking, “That’s the third time someone has told me, ‘You’ve changed lately and not for the better. Is anything going on that you want to talk about’?” it’s finally time to pay attention to the messages the universe is sending you. And secondly we can allow ourselves to do that which is integral to us, that which we care about most. I love writing and I love doing something to help make the world a kinder place and those two things led me back to school where I and my “signs” finally meshed.

But reading signs can be difficult. I have written over a dozen novels and none of them were ever published. I still want to write novels. I don’t know if they are merely practice for my non-fiction writing, or if I’m meant to do them but I haven’t found the right genre, or the right agent or the right publisher, or if novel-writing is meant to be an escapist hobby. Sometimes I have stopped writing for long periods because I … just … don’t … know … what I’m supposed to do with all that.

I read Jim Butcher novels and at the end of them he writes a little about how he became a novelist. His story helps me a little. He fell in love with sword and sorcery (as did I) but he didn’t publish in that genre. Instead he writes about a wizard in contemporary Chicago who solves unique crimes that often include things from the world of “never-never”. Today, he finally has a “sword and horses” novel or two to his credit. Maybe I’m supposed to write my masters and doctoral thesis and then write some fiction that matters to me … and to an agent and a publisher and a few dozen dedicated readers. One thing I can tell you is … I’m taking that Jim Butcher add-on at the back of his books for what it is. It’s a sign, I tell you. I don’t know exactly what it is telling me, but I refuse to ignore it.

Cheers, everyone. Read your signs. You will know a sign when it speaks to your heart, where you and no one else will be hurt … but it may mean doing a hell of a lot of work in the process … like writing a masters and doctoral thesis.

Be kind to one another out there eh?

Oh yeah. And we are one another’s signmasters, aren’t we. When we say things like, “You’ve changed lately. Is anything going on that you want to talk about?” we’re seeing things in others the things they haven’t paid attention to … yet. We are one another’s signs too, eh!

Owen