The Kindness Diaries: One Man's Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World by Logothesis Leon

Author:Logothesis, Leon [Logothesis, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Readers Digest
Published: 2014-12-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.”

—Edgar W. Howe

I have a confession to make, admittedly it is over twenty years late, but as they say, better late than never: I hated school. Almost every minute I was forced to sit at that desk, listening to teachers, was pure, unadulterated hell. And I had the grades to prove it. At one point, I scored 18% on a chemistry exam. And the fact that I got 18% of the questions correct was a near miracle. No, unfortunately, memorizing facts and being tested on them was just two rungs up from Chinese water torture. I didn’t realize it until much later, but the reason for that was that facts and figures and chemistry didn’t speak to me. Other people’s stories did.

Although my schooling wasn’t much of a success, I found another way of learning. It was by fantasizing about walking on the moon that I became interested in astronomy. It was by wondering where the hell Antarctica was that I pulled out my first map. It was by dreaming that I would ride a motorcycle across the world that one day . . . Well, you know the rest.

And yet without the education I received, I don’t know that I would have ever been open to those lessons. It was because I understood the context of the countries that I was visiting, that I was also better able to understand their people . . . and ultimately myself. I walked through India with my English accent, keenly aware of the role my country had played in the history of this modern nation. I quickly saw how my Queen’s English and my white skin affected the dynamics between me and the people I met. I could feel the weight of history as though it were riding next to me in Kindness One’s sidecar. But I knew that in dropping the mask, the mask of my accent, and that of the horrendous baggage of our mutual past, that in some way, the dynamic might be shifted yet again.

No school could teach the lessons of India. It seemed that all the crises of the world—poverty, inequality, spirituality, and a glut of technology—were playing out on the broken rubble of its streets. And perhaps this was no more true than in Delhi, where the modern world sat right on top of the ancient one, the old roots of Hinduism and Islam rising through the billboard ads for cell phones and Coca-Cola.

As I had anticipated, it was difficult to find people to give me things they did not have. I spent nearly an entire day sitting at a gas station waiting for someone to give me gas. Apparently (like the sport of cricket), waiting was a national pastime in India, and I was becoming quite accomplished in it. But what I received in place of gas or water or even food were the stories of a nation.

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