Kindness makes life worth living
THE thought of Anne has been with me since I read about the retired art teacher who decided, at 89, to take her own life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.
I feel nothing but compassion for her, and some respect, too. For she took control, saying no to what she clearly saw as a bleak future, dogged by ill-health.
Yet when I read that she gave as a reason for suicide the ‘lack of humanity’ she perceived all around her, I wanted to protest. Surely there is another message?
Anne felt she was ‘swimming against the current’, unable to cope with a tacky society seemingly obsessed by technology, shopping, and fast food, and indifferent to the destruction of the planet.
Many of us will identify with that f eeling of helpless pessimism: the conviction that the world is plunging downhill at a breakneck pace and people, glued to computers and smartphones, are (in Anne’s words) ‘becoming more remote’.
Yet think of all the many small acts of kindness, the whispered words of support, the hands held out to a neighbour, the tears shed in compassion for the less fortunate.
All add up to a huge groundswell of human kindness that is the antidote to the selfishness and indifference which seems to characterise modern life. To deny these things exist is almost a blasphemy. ‘Lack of humanity’? No. Not everywhere.
What’s more, we can never know how the sunlight will look on the leaves tomorrow morning. How the glorious drifts of snowdrops might be even better next January. How we may hear or do something intensely wonderful — and entirely unexpected. The sight of one daffodil, the sound of one bird can offer renewal.
This is the endless possibility that living offers — and (ever the optimist) I cling to the thought that it’s worth persevering through the darker days because of the chance we may be ‘surprised by joy’.
As for a sense of meaninglessness . . . well, I tell myself I’ll live my life in such a way that it does have meaning, that it matters. This is the challenge which offers each of us the chance to be heroic.