Where Did Kindness Find You?

In a panic, a few days after D-Day, I reached out to a friend for help indexing the book I was working on and that was due a couple of week's later. I gave her only the sketchiest of details of D-Day and asked if she'd help me. I could barely think, let alone index a 200-page non-fiction book. She stepped up without hesitation.
A few weeks after that, I was at a restaurant meeting a friend for a bite and a drink. I hadn't planned on telling her what I was going through but she kept insisting that something was wrong so I caved. Her eyes filled with tears. And then, with a voice steely with resolve, she told me that, since she worked in the same office as my husband and the OW, she would be my eyes and ears. "I've got your back," she promised.
There were plenty of moments like those. When the people around me stepped up to help me when I needed it most. We sometimes miss them, focussed instead on the wrong done to us, the petty annoyances on top of our pain that make us wonder if the world is conspiring against us.
My eldest, who has an anxiety disorder, attended her orientation a few months ago as a transfer student. New to the school, she was determined to get out and make friends. But despite a big smile and a "hey, I'm S", student after student looked pained and turned away.
She sat down on a bench and fought tears. And then another student, this one part of the school's orientation team, sat down with her and introduced himself. "Why don't you join us?" he said. 
My daughter told me this story last night, two months later. The moment has stayed with her.
And that's what unexpected kindness does. 
I think so often of the secret sister on this site who provided her therapist with a gift card to a running store to be given to a betrayed wife who might benefit from running through her pain. I'm delighted at the upcoming plan of our own huge-hearted LilyLove, to create a support group for betrayed wives in her town, based on the kindness she sees here on this site. 
I smile frequently at the support I see daily on Twitter, where #SickNotWeak followers shore each other up. I make it a habit to "like" the post by the stranger who reminds her followers at the end of each day that it was another 24 hours of sobriety for her. 
Kindness is in the dingy church basement where I work on language skills with newcomers who fled war and oppression and who brought food last week (so much food!) to celebrate the successful surgery of one of our ESL teachers. 
It's there, even in the midst of your darkness.
Look for kindness. Extend kindness. Notice kindness.

I leave you with this excerpt from her poem Kindness by poet Naomi Shihab Nye:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

...

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 

...

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.