Sometimes there seems to be no other person alive in the world. A misty Sunday morning, dripping trees, everything gray and quiet and swampy, I walk because I think I have to, not because I am enjoying myself to the fullest. Someone walks along the path along the ditch, someone with a dog – dogs draw people into the world. The man stands still and lets his dog sit at his foot, he looks at him forcefully and I expect that there will hardly be a greeting, because that is what happens when a walker has turned into a dog’s owner. The man looks up for a moment and says “good morning” and I say that too and then he really looks at me, smiles kindly and wishes “a nice Sunday”.
How do you continue walking? Very different. Suddenly I feel cheerfully at home in my life and in this place. In this empty landscape of barren fields and broken roadsides, I am apparently at my place.
I remember the first time I felt that way, more than twenty years ago when I just came to live in the Groningen countryside. I was standing around pruning some pruning shears in my new front garden, my very first front garden, and the neighbor came by on his bike and said cheerfully, “Hi”. Then you suddenly think: I exist.
Other people sometimes only have to do very little to make you feel part of – I don’t really know what. Society suddenly sounds so political, and it isn’t, although it certainly has something to do with living together. It is something like the line of poetry ‘I confirm/ that I am alive, that I am not alone’.
Remco Campert wrote that about poetry (“Poetry is an act of affirmation”) and it certainly applies to that, something new is created, intended to be shared. But it also appears to apply to something as simple as a greeting, a look, a tiny kind word.
Sometimes I think of Jan Peter Balkenende, of his call for decency
Of course we know that, and it can all get very sappy. Maybe you shouldn’t be too afraid of sweets? It’s lame to call it that. People generally like to do something nice for someone – stand on a street corner and look around and someone will come and show you the way, a mother with a child in a cart is always helped out of the tram, on the train there is usually a young person who stands up in a crowded compartment for an older person. The fact that the latter is less obvious may have to do with the effort it takes – effortless kindness is simply the simplest.
As simple as effortless unkindness, and yet you (I) encounter it less often. There are people who encounter exactly that all the time. And there are people who consider it their duty, as it were, to promote that unkindness.
Sometimes I think of Jan Peter Balkenende. About his call for decency and how, despite his rather obvious right, it sounded so intensely naughty. ‘In addition to a price, every word has a shadow/ in that shadow we recognize each other’, wrote Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad in her ‘Declaration of Principles’ as Poet of the Netherlands.
I once saw a video in a museum of someone greeting everyone on the city street in the morning. “Good idea,” I said to the visitor who happened to be standing next to me. “Then I hope I don’t run into you,” he replied.
