Contagious Kindness

I have thought a lot recently about how things spread. Having lived in China for three years, I have been concerned with the welfare of many friends still out there who are dealing with the impact of the Coronavirus. Checking in with people to see if they had made it back to their home countries during evacuation made me realise just how sparse my connections to them had been previously. It took an international crisis to bring us closer again.

This also got me thinking and reminiscing about China, something that has been painful to do for many reasons, but this time it was a positive reflection.

I remembered the village I lived in. In the shadow of a huge, sprawling city but still a vibrant, close knit community. Kids would play together outside, parents and grandparents sat on doorsteps or pavements chatting, playing cards.

The local park would buzz with villagers walking morning and evening, groups practising kung fu, old men with their song birds and ladies dancing in unison to an old fashioned CD player.

Everyone would smile and greet one another.

It would become punishingly cold in winter and my walk home would take me past the houses of villagers cooking on small stoves or fires. They ALWAYS waved to me and offered me food, green tea or, if I was particularly unlucky, Bi Jou, (a clear spirit similar to meths!)!

In the summer it was unbearably hot and I would take cooled crates of Tsing Tao beer from my fridge  and deliver them to the men sat in the shade of the street playing cards or mahjong in the evenings.

We didn’t speak many words of the same language. We learned from each other but the common dialect was that of community. Togetherness. Kindness.

In the UK I grew up in a small village where your business was everyone’s business and my mum would often know what trouble I had caused before I even made it home to confess!

It used to frustrate me that people would pry and gossip. I now feel that it came with an enormous positive aspect. People cared. People knew you, worried about you and pulled together when someone was in need.

I’m not trying to suggest that all was rosy in 1980’s England but I do sometimes wonder if we have lost a little of that connectivity?

Is that why the spread of kindness is not as virulent as it should be? Are we too disparate these days? Living side by side but connected by wires not words. Technology not touch.

My neighbour reached out to me this week. A woman I don’t know well, to my shame.

She took the time to check on another human. She stepped out of her bubble of existence and into mine and brought warmth, hope, compassion and kindness.

And that lead to me doing something similar.

Maybe sometimes we need to release ourselves from the imposes social quarantine that modern living has us existing in. We need to connect in order for the kindness contagion to take hold.

So go on! Get out there and infect your community!