cultivating lovingkindness

when i was doing my best to do 'very little' which is what i think i'm quite good at, even if i fail at doing it at all, in sweden, i had a lot of time to ponder. often the mind shifts in shallow, errant thinking. my mind at any rate wallows quite blissfully in small currents. yet, i made notes on my current environments and my own attitudes toward my life as a human. i thought of an absolutely unoriginal aphorism: to write well, one doesn't need to be an asshole.

perhaps it was modernism, and the romantics before them, that cultivated the persona of the mad artist who toiled in isolation and suffered greatly for her art. doesn't work for me. suffering begets only suffering and produces very little in the ways of living and the arts. better yet, isn't pleasure, however you define the word, the greater good? should we not as humans cultivate a lovingkindness in our lives, our arts, our writings, and by further extension, our technologies and our governments?

i work better when i'm happier. i know that and i prefer the company of people who can create pleasure in themselves and in me. lovingkindness does not mean an end to crankiness, or shallowness, or even being pissed off at the state of our world. but the practice of lovingkindness i think encourages others to do the same. i'm not sure where to go from there, of course. often, in our society when one is labelled 'a nice guy' that is quite often code for being weak and an easy mark. that code is a false marker. being nice and practicing niceness does not make one weaker. i recall something the gnostic philip k. dick once wrote, that to practice love is the greater of hate, because love is harder than hate, and greater for it being so.

better still, please see gabriel gudding's post on developing a kind mind by clicking here. gudding's rationale is more fine and an extremely crisp, lucid argument for what i've stumbled thru here. the intellect is also a great source of pleasure and gudding's mind is one of the better minds i've read on the topic of writing and lovingkindness. in fact, gudding is one of the rare poets who is actively seeking a writing of anti-meanness. poetry, i think, is made the better for it.