Kindness and compassion are tributes to the 1,000
There have now been more than 1,000 deaths to COVID-19 in Toronto in the months since the pandemic sped around the globe. What would The One Thousand — the beloved, the mourned — say if they could give a last testament to the world?
Perhaps something like the following, thoughts left by the late American columnist and aphorist Sydney J. Harris over the course of a splendid career:
“No single way of living is exclusively right.”
The only thing we don’t have to learn is how to be a baby. After that, it’s learning every step of the way.
“The most obvious truths in the world are often the hardest to grasp.”
There is no self-made man or woman. No generation starts with nothing. “The whole world is a giant legacy … We owe loyalty and gratitude to the past.”
Virtue is a habit rather than a quality, developed by practising kindness and compassion.
“It is impossible to be passively good.” Goodness means more than doing no harm. Goodness requires deeds.
The greatest teachers were “not so much concerned with how we think or what we think, as with how we behave toward one another.”
Be passionate about something, “passionate for an answer big enough to include everybody.”
Habits of thought are persistent and confining. Examine them.
“Self-doubt is one mark of sanity.” Strong people know their weaknesses, the weak cannot admit them.
Part of the wisdom of learning to live with others is in knowing what can be changed and what cannot be, in one’s self as well as others.
Ask what you have personally done to change what needs changing, preserve what needs preserving. Ask when you last talked with someone of another age, social status, race, religion, political view. “The more we know of any given person, the harder it becomes to hate him.”
Try to see those who offend or frighten us as “the child he was.” Remember that something happened to them.
“Crassness is always a sign of weakness; the blusterer is full of fear.”
Children love to be taught, and when they resist it is because something has already gone wrong with the child or with the system of teaching.
“Frustration can be good for a child.” Everyone is frustrated by something in life. The way we gain maturity is by learning to cope with frustration.
A parent should try to rear a child not so much to be a dutiful child as to be a good parent. This is the only “repayment” of a parent’s love that we have any right to expect or hope for.
Marriage is a process, a learning process that takes patience above all, and is never finished.
The greatest of teachers do so by questioning, by parable, by example.
The hardest lesson to learn is that you gain your life by giving it away in love and service.
“In humility lies the beginning of wisdom.”
It’s a good bet that The One Thousand would be smiling and nodding.