After a long, exhausting, and challenging (but successful!) week where this farm sent out a record amount of food, I was hoping to wake up to a slow news day on Sunday. Alas, in a world full of love and good people, hate still claims the news and forces our attention on the horrible. It engages our fascination with the abomination (credit to Joseph Conrad for the phrase) and, if we’re not careful, lands us deep in a tar pit of despair over the state of humanity.
And so once again, we retreated to the river for some nature immersion with the wonderful, kind, and generous fellow river-loving people who continuously welcome us into their world with gentle, open arms. We returned to the farm Sunday evening full of gratitude, love, and hope for our fellow human beings.
The truth, that we so often need reminded of because our brains are wired to emphasize the negative and bad news is what keeps us watching or listening, is that we’re surrounded by good people committing random acts of kindness all around us all the time. Our minds can so easily skip right over the held door, the small smile, the car that stopped to let us into the traffic flow. But if we just shift our focus a little bit, we’ll see that this is the actual reality around us: kindness and humanity are our “normal”.
