Finding kindness in a world gone mad

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I fell off some machine at the gym the other day. Yes, at the gym. I finally went back. COVID had made me stop. Necessity made me return. I signed up for a few sessions with a trainer who showed me what to do. Then I went back on my own to practice what I’d learned.

That’s when I ended up on the gym floor, arms and legs askew, more embarrassed than hurt.

But here’s the good part of the story: Even before I had time to realize I was flat on my backside, a younger woman — most everyone at the gym is younger — came sprinting toward me shouting “Are you OK?”

And I was. And I remain OK because thinking of this woman I didn’t know and of her immediate instinct to help has kept me from throwing in the towel this week, not just at the gym, but at the world.

Because life here on planet Earth is a mess. And every day it gets a little worse. And while we are all very good at bobbing and weaving and distracting ourselves with family and work and school and holidays and sports and shopping and senseless, mindless, psychologically necessary TV shows, sometimes the truth, despite all of our diversions, comes home to roost.

And the truth is this: Each of us is on this planet for such a short time and instead of getting along and working together and finding solutions for problems and diseases and natural disasters that affect all of us, we build walls and empires and bombs and more deadly bombs and argue and compete and judge and dominate and kill.

And we call all this civilization.

Until two weeks ago, I didn’t know how prevalent safe rooms are in Israel. A safe room, in a home or in a public building, exists to protect people from bombs, toxins, and terrorists. A safe room has reinforced concrete walls and ceilings, sealed doors and windows, a ventilation system, and communication devices. Safe rooms in homes are usually the children’s room so that in the middle of the night, when a siren wails — and they wail frequently — children do not have to leave their beds to be safe. Parents go to them.

Safe rooms are pragmatic. Like armed guards. Like metal detectors. Like beefed-up security everywhere. But having to have them fills me with such sorrow that people live this way, on alert, so many on hyper-alert, teaching their kids to hide in sealed-off rooms, in school closets, waiting for the next shoe to drop.

What happened in Israel two weeks ago, families hunted down and executed in their homes? This is no aberration. It has happened before. Anne Frank’s diary awoke me to this type of genocide. But I was a naive 13-year-old, and I thought that this could never happen again.

And then World War II ended. And there was peace on Earth for a nanosecond. But then came more wars — call them conflicts, call them massacres, call them genocides. It’s been war after war after war in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Gulf War, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Ukraine — all front-page news at first, but not for long. Because it’s too much, all the things we can’t control, and because back at the ranch, on the homefront, we have always had our own made-in-the-USA problems.

Last week, I saw a picture online of a dead man lying in a street somewhere in Israel. A paved street with yellow and white lines, not much different from the street I see from my window right now. The man’s right leg was exposed from the knee down, a sneaker on his foot, a Nike, so white it looked as if just came out of a box. Had he been shopping the day before? Or did his wife buy him the sneakers? Or his mother? Was this the first time he wore them? Was he jogging when terrorists killed him? Or was he running away? Did they stab him? Shoot him? Torture him?

I have no answers. I have no insights. And I have no prayers. I have whiplash from the news, all of it, every word of it bad.

I think about the woman who rushed to help me at the gym. And how she made me feel. And I vow to pay it forward. To be kind. To help a stranger. To smile, to say hello, hold a door, let someone cut in front of me when I’m driving or when I’m in a checkout line.

All small things. Because small things are all I can do.

Beverly Beckham’s column appears every two weeks. She can be reached at bev@beverlybeckham.com.