The smiling man

I’ve hardly started and I can already see this blog is not quite honest. I’ve said it’s about kindness when actually I think it’s more to do with courage. Less about what I can do for others and more about what acts of kindness can do for me.

What brought this home to me so powerfully was a chapter in the brilliant book I’m currently reading, Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff. In a section on ‘seeing the world as your family’ she tells a story that reached right into my gut.

A woman called Happy Oasis (yes, I had that reaction too… what!!!?, but stay with the story and you’ll forgive her for this lapse of name-taste) was travelling through Bangladesh and got caught in floods. She describes how the road got washed away and her bus was marooned on a small patch of higher ground where, all around, destitute people were dying of dysentery and starvation.

the man by the bus

The only westerner, she was also the only one who stayed on the bus, feeling, for the first time since arriving in the country, powerless.

She had cash and travellers’ cheques but what use were they in this situation? There was no bank and nothing to buy in any case. That was why people were literally starving to death around her.

Wait for the Red Cross or some other aid agency to arrive and muck in? Well, it was clear no-one was coming.

Happy – who presumably had a pretty ordinary name at this stage in her story – describes how she sat alone in the bus and began sobbing in  helplessness and shock. Until, after many minutes had passed, she looked up and spotted a skinny, scantily-clad man peering through the window and smiling broadly at her.

Her frustration boiled over and she snapped at him, demanding to know how he could smile in such awful circumstances.

With simple grace the smiling man replied “a smile is all I have to give, madam.”

The gift of compassion

The man told her to come with him, out into the rain, to help him offer what comfort they could to those who were dying. For ten long hours they went from person to person, kneeling beside them, and singing softly.

Happy says that her companion sang ‘soul-stirring Muslim chants’ while she sang the Christian songs she’d learned years back at summer camp. The music seemed to bring some comfort and peace to the dying. I recall my mother saying it’s important to continue speaking lovingly to the dying for our  hearing is the last of our senses to leave us.

But I’m certain the many people they knelt and sang to were as comforted by just as comforted by their companionship and a human touch at this loneliest of times.

It turns out Happy wasn’t helpless at all in this unimaginable situation.

a change of heart

Recalling her smiling teacher Happy says: ‘Without a penny, without any material item, he’d eased the suffering of hundreds of people by offering his love and joy. I made a silent vow to be like that smiling man…In the years since  I have made it a priority in my life to be as happy as I can, to share that happiness with as many people as possible, and to treat everyone I meet as family.” (And, it turns out, to change her name to Happy Oasis and describe herself as a ‘Blissologist’!).

learning from Happy

There are a number of reasons this story stopped me in my tracks. First of all, it doesn’t involve some  grand charitable gesture like, but the most basic of the gifts we’re born with: the ability to smile, to make music, and to reach out to others and connect with them.

Secondly, Happy was only able to act when someone gave her permission. When the Smiling Man told her what to do.

That doesn’t make the ten hours she spent caring for the dying less valuable. But it does demonstrate the extent to which those of us, like me, who are trying to live a kinder, more compassionate life, have to first overcome the barriers which keep us locked in our own lives:

• fear of doing the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time
• reluctance to step outside what’s ‘normal’ or comfortable for us
• a default position which encourages us to  think first about giving money to problems rather than time or attention.  (Have you ever suggested to a charity doorstepper who wants to sign you up to monthly donations that you’d be happy to donate some time instead?  They just don’t know what to do with that one!

a gift of great price

But most tellingly of all, what this one half day in one life did was turn everything entirely on its head.

It wasn’t only her name Happy changed but her whole attitude, her approach to life, her purpose.

Of all the people in the field that day, she was the biggest winner because of the way the experience expanded her. And expanded her life.

I could do with some of that.