Everything, including a random sequence of words, appears for a reason. Thus, there is a line that was buried in one of my asynchronous posts the other day that I now must reprise:
“Nice people don't do nice things to be nice; they do them because they are nice.”
***
One time, somebody I know was feeling very much alone when a sweet voice came to him and said, “Write a letter.”
This letter was not to be mailed via the postal system, or as an email message. Instead, it was to be entrusted to one of the Pacific Seagulls that abound all along the California coast.
This particular letter was to move through slow time, which is far from what most of us experience these days. It was not to be understood in the present circumstances of either the writer or the recipient. It was meant to be from the future of one, and to the future of the other.
Unless it could be done that way, it wasn’t to be written (or read) at all.
My friend agreed to these terms. Here is the letter that resulted:
Waking up in the night, I thought of you. And, as has happened many times before, I started composing a letter to you in my mind. But then an odd thing happened. The letter kept changing, morphing, iterating much like software does.
It seemed like this letter, above all others, was actually a living creature.
At first the letter stayed in the past, first with visions of careless, happy times, and then, inevitably, to my hopeless confusion at the way those times ended.
The letter then got stuck there for a very long time, and I felt nothing but simmering anger, resentment, disbelief and a horrible sense of guilt.
But then, as the letter kept rewriting itself, all of those initial emotions gradually began to fade. One by one, every negative feeling shriveled up and floated above me, waiting to be carried somewhere far away.
It was then that the bird came into view -- white and gray, huge, majestic, soaring high above, looking down at me. I knew this bird had come to take it all away. This was a way to let go of everything bad and sorrowful from the past, including all of my regrets.
So I did let them go. But at the end of all that, the bird still was waiting for me to give up one last thing, something I’d been hiding all along. It looked at me with an expression that meant, “Yes, that too has to die.” I hesitated, then released my grip. And the bird away flew with our future, the one that never got the chance to be.
Beyond the Continental Shelf, the bird dropped all of this baggage, which promptly sank below the waves, down to the benthos, where no light can reach. There, nothing is seen and nothing is heard. It is the one place on earth of perfect nothingness -- a suitable resting place for all of our least wanted feelings.
Then the bird flew on, moving now more like a giant eagle, with a new lightness of spirit and grace until I lost all sight of it.
At this point, I became drowsy and the pictures in my mind, though hazy, turned back to the past again, but this time, for the first time, their substance had changed. Now the memories were only of the good things, the wonderful things, times of kindness and of generosity -- both given and received. And it came to me that these need not die, they are real and true and can endure forever. No bird need ever need come to carry them away.
Reliving all of the beauty brought tears to my eyes, not of sadness, but of gratitude. I realized how wonderful we both are. And the line came to me:
“Nice people don't do nice things to be nice; they do them because they are nice.”
When I awoke, my mood was truly tranquil for the first time in months. And I still felt only that one thing – gratitude.
Should this letter, on the wings of an eagle, ever reach all the way from me to you, far out into our common future, perhaps then we will fully share -- for the very first time -- a sense of gratitude that truly extends both ways.
Because that is what’s deserved by two very nice people, and also because that is the one thing that need never die.
-30-
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