On Kindness and Worms

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.

- Shakespeare

Lately I have been curiously attending to my interpretation of experiences. The phrase "things aren't always as they seem" is wrong; for things are indeed always as they seem. Things are always something other than what they seem, as well. All interpretations are valid... as well as none. Kindness to others, and interestingly also to ourselves, depends on our ability to relieve our own perspectives from their place atop golden pedestals.

I'd like to share the following story recently recounted by a Harvard professor.

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Parents of a young school-aged child received reports that the child was too inwardly-focused and not oriented to other people, leading to their concern of him possibly being autistic. The parents, unsurprisingly alarmed, decided not to seek formal professional help just yet, and ask their friend, a psychologist, to observe the child while he was at recess instead.

Upon his arrival at the school, the staff pointed out the child to the psychologist, though he would have had no problem picking him out from the crowd of children. The boy was standing alone in a secluded area of the playground while the rest of the kids were busy playing nearby. The boy was holding a stick in his right hand and was waving and playing around with it. He started to dig the stick into the ground and happened upon a small worm. The psychologist was highly interested in how the boy would deal with another living creature – as you may very well know that psychologists are highly interested in this sort of thing. 

But the psychologist proceeded to watch in horror as the boy found a couple of large rocks, stretched the worm to the limits of its elasticity, and pegged the worm's ends down under the rocks. Then to his great dismay, the psychologist blankly stared on as the boy took another big rock with a good, sharp edge, lifted his arm up into the sky, and then slammed the rock into the ground, splitting the worm cleanly in half. 

The psychologist shuddered in disbelief, “how am I going to tell his parents about this?” But then through good luck or divine intervention, the psychologist had stuck around long enough to see the next thing that happened. The boy picked up one half of the worm in one hand, and the other half of the worm in his other hand, put the two halves next to each other and empathically said, 

“There! Now you have a friend.”

- Professor Robert Kegan