A friend turned up at the garden gate on Father’s Day morning with a boxful of kittens. I initially thought it was some rhubarb as he had promised to drop some round, but as he stood at our garden gate, socially distancing of course, I could hear the tiny mewing of 6 gorgeous grey tabby bundles of fluff barely visible snuggled up amongst blankets in the box they were born in, and my heart melted. His own kitten, rescued some months before from sure death, had sloped off one night on the town and got herself up the duff and hey presto, had had her own little kittens only 5 days before. She was chilling in her own carrier, happy to be driven around as he showed off her brood, puffed up like the proud grandfather he had become – he had been visiting his own son in the next village and thought on the off chance we would enjoy a sneaky peek on a Sunday morning - which we did - it went down very well and set my mood a notch upwards for the rest of the day and it got me really thinking.
This random act of kindness, that he thought I could do with a boost, really touched me. The fact that his own kitten was alive at all was down to the kindness of my friend – he had rescued her, literally, from the jaws of death on his friend’s farm. She was her found lying outside being worried by an over inquisitive farm dog ready to take a bite of the juicy morsel. They tried to re-introduce her back into her litter, but her mum rejected her and refused to feed her, so he took pity on her and took her home, hand reared her, feeding her through a pipette until she was fully weaned; and she imprinted on him and stuck very firmly to him, more dog than cat – and in the few short months had become his best buddy, riding alongside him in his car as he went to his gardening jobs. And as tempted as I was, he had already managed to find homes for all 6 kittens – ensuring each went to kind deserving homes; ready to spread a bit of joy, asking nothing in return apart from a small donation to a charity in lieu of payment.
Being kind doesn’t take much. But being kind is something we can all forget when we are tied up in a tizwas. The last few months for everyone on this planet has been weird, really weird. Some people have loved being locked away, able to take time out of life to re-order and re-think. Others have really struggled. I am one of those that have found it pretty tough – no routine, no space, no privacy, no choice, no freedom. And, as I wrote before in my earlier blog, ‘The C-Word’, as a family, we haven’t any complicated additional domestic layers to unpick. However, over the last few months, I have become focussed inwards on myself, caring only what the effect of Covid-19 has had on my own little bubble - grappling with notions of guilt, hopelessness and anger. I’ve been furious that 2020 is so grim – a big black marker I can’t control, has scribbled all over the precious moments I had planned, the memories of what would been have now been abandoned like worthless souvenirs.
I still keep a paper day to day diary, and take great joy every year filling it in – birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, trips, appointments, events; and as the year cracks on it gets filled up in my scruffy handwriting and I have great joy not only looking forward to things to come, but back over the years remembering funny insignificant days that otherwise would have been pigeonholed into the part of my brain that forgets the trivia. According to my 2020 diary, life has been scrapped. I have had to stop myself alerting the rest of my family every single time I see yet another ditched day, blurting out random disappointments from a friend’s postponed wedding to my son’s cancelled prom.
Spending a few months wrapped up in my bubble, just feeling cross, has not done my mental health any good at all. I have forgotten all the small building blocks I normally rely on to keep me being me; from the deep breathing meditative exercises first thing in the morning, to learning to be thankful for what I DO have and accept what and where I am. And part of this, I think, I have forgotten that little acts of kindness can help along the way. During lockdown especially, the ‘random acts of kindness’ mantra has entered our vocab – saying thank you to key workers, painting rainbows, sharing resources, saying hello to strangers, being kind to yourself. There was someone local to us who was crocheting beautiful little coloured flowers and leaving them with positive notes in random places – dangling from trees, along footpaths, in hedgerows. I was truly delighted when I found one, I took it home, showed my family and on my next dog walk, re-hid it so someone else would be as enchanted as I was when they first discovered it. And I think this is the point of this blog – forgetting to be kind – whether that is to others, but more importantly to yourself – is HUGE. It doesn’t matter how angry I have felt over the last few months, it isn’t going to change the fact that the first few months of 2020 has been utter shite. Being cross about it won’t ever change it. Perhaps instead we should try and turn it around and embrace the lost lockdown birthdays and tell our teens who didn’t get to take their exams, that they are part of an amazing generation that will be remembered in the history books of the future.
It shouldn’t have taken a boxful of kittens, or an adorable crocheted flower for me to acknowledge how important it is to be kind, but it was the jolt out of my zone I needed. By beating myself up recently, I haven’t been very kind to myself, I haven’t given myself a hug – not even a virtual one, and considering it is going to be a while yet before we can get on and give family and friends proper squashy ones; I think I am going to have to try a little bit harder.
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