Sincerity And Tenderness As Affirmations Of Life

Photo by Andrew Thornebrooke on Unsplash 

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.

Robert Bly

The final echoes of a day truly come from the brief, flittering moments of kindness from ordinary people, one to another. 

When you imagine a daily activity, tying shoes, making coffee, staring at the cat, making eye contact with a stranger, or helping a child tie their shoes, making a cup o’ joe for a loved one before they wake up, petting the cat, and asking stranger, “How are you, today?”, they strike countless times in a year. 

They’re ordinary. They’re here as if presented in a banal black-and-white film from an early 20th century silent film. Nothing too much to make of them; no-person to see on the other side. A distant observer taking part in an activity for their self for one part, of the day. 

That’s it. 

Another lousy sunrise, even, these moments may reflect a Buddhist version of the proverbially enigmatic Enlightenment state of consciousness, but, maybe, that version has it all wrong. The colour in the film in a current moment made in reaching out to another may be the more substantial inversion of the image. 

By “moments of kindness,” the intention is getting at the feeling of sincerity – you just know it – and tenderness to create an intuitive grasp of genuine connection, how ever small, with another individual, for a moment, swift. 

Sincerity, in this sense, comes to mean an emotional honesty akin to the phrase “intellectual honesty.” I live for those moments. Everything is at ease, put right, by themselves. An effortfulness in the emotionality means an insincerity, even pushing the breadth of the harshness. It jars the emotions the way an intolerant sound ruining a piece of music does it. 

I mean, I’m looking at my cat right now: Should I pet him, as suggest above? Maybe, at the same time, in overthinking it, I lose the sincerity of the act; its naturalness. There is a there, there; there’s a transaction, a trade, there. 

And to force the act would be to enforce the moment, so as to nullify the idea of a genuine, sincere act of tenderness, the idea of sincerity and tenderness is natural actions guided by a honed instinct there when young and relearned in adulthood. 

Moments as gradient transitions one into the other in harmonious action with oneself and the environment. Graduated, natural, emotionally honest acts are the basis for not only an authentic life, and a real life. 

They’re some of the best moments of peace in our lives. They put us at ease. Sincerity and tenderness in our lives are just those moments when done to us, and when done by us to others. A day coming to an end in reflection of those fluttering moments sets forth an expectation the next morning, the new beginning, for a happy cyclical quality to what has happened before. `

In truth, a naturalness to our acts in life affects the quality of our mental and emotional life, and brings out the one true thing we all have in us, by being us: an affirmation of life.