Random Acts of Kinship
The phrase jumped off the page of the book at me. “Random acts of kinship.”
“Yes,” I thought, “of course!” What we need now more than ever are random acts of kinship, the acknowledgement that we are in fact related and we belong to each other. An unwinding of fabricated measures of non-kinship. Recognizing the humanity in people we disagree with, people who may be different from us in so many ways or only one. One difference that we let stand in the way of all we share.
How would things change if we had these moments? If we committed these “acts of kinship?”
Would we behave differently with people around us? Would we speak differently about strangers? Would we stop and think before we react to what ‘others’ say and do? Would we start to feel the kinship more? Would we change? Would the world change?
I dove eagerly back into the book to see what the author had to say…only to discover that I had misread it, and the words were the more familiar “random acts of kindness.” A perfectly good phrase, but it no longer seemed strong enough to me. Kindness is necessary. But kinship is even more so. If we can’t feel the kinship that we share, we’re stuck in our own little lives, our own little bubbles, our own little ‘me, not us.’
It’s time to act on our kinship.