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Recently, I wrote about lifting a limo as an act of caretaking, but this week, I encountered kindness on the far opposite end of the theatrical spectrum, almost a bookend of sorts. This person offered up the idea that no, we often don’t need to go far out of our way—we may not even have to break our pace—to step into the caretaking realm.
A few weeks ago, around 9PM, a group of friends and I mingled in the courtyard area near the Bronze Bull statue, planning for a relatively mundane evening. We were surrounded by clusters of other groups also eating ice cream from The Parlour across the street, and most everyone seemed settled into the routine of, This is how our very predictable night will go. Right on cue, a large limo comes scooting down Parrish Street, aiming to make a right turn onto Market Street (an already narrow street made even more confined by the row of parallel-parked cars). The driver slowly begins to make the turn and it soon becomes clear that a successful right turn is not in the cards for this thirty-foot long stretch limo, but the driver makes this decision a bit too late. He begins to back up, hoping to correct the angle (or else abandon the turn altogether), but the light pole at the corner prohibits him from cutting across the curb and before long, he’s stuck.
Consider this my formal petition to ban the word “busy” on Duke’s campus—at least until we can figure out how to use it as a meaningful word that gives some substance back. Right now, we throw it around as placeholder confetti so much that it’s come to mean virtually nothing, although our check-ins usually feel incomplete without them. Over the last four years, I’ve trained this craft to the point that I barely knew how to respond to the “How’s your week going?” question without any mention of my busy-ness. I certainly didn’t recognize it at the time, but as a first year, I somehow learned that this is the way we converse with each other here, then adapted my own language to nestle in neatly to this mold.
Last week during parents’ weekend, my family and I went to a Duke yoga session and set up on the East Campus Lawn with a small cohort of stragglers. Most of us weren’t terribly advanced in the practice and one man in particular seemed out of his element, jovially telling us beforehand that we “weren’t allowed to laugh” at him during the class. We all journeyed through the class, and afterwards, as we were folding up our respective beach towel yoga mats, he came over to my sister and me.
As I’ve embarked on this journey to seek out moments of caretaking at Duke, I’ve started developing a sort of antenna-like sense that alerts me whenever this type of moment might happen. As I see someone heading towards a door, running for the C1 or navigating a crowded parking lot, I sometimes hold my breath and think, “Okay, here we go, I’m about to see something good.” I scramble to open my notes app, put on my writing cap and brace myself to witness someone extend themselves to caretaking. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. Despite what occurs in the actual moment, though, the readiness for that kind of interaction has me curious about my own notions of care. These moments are ripe for obvious acts of kindness, so I pay extra attention to them—yet lately I’ve witnessed (and felt) caretaking that’s snuck up on me when I wasn’t sleuthing it out. And in all honesty, it doesn’t look like caretaking at first glance, but I’m pretty convinced that it is.
People seem to love showing each other around the gardens. The last several times I’ve been here, it feels like a classroom, people pointing out each individual plant that they want their companions to see.
I’m trudging through a hike this summer, ankles coated in dust and nose in 100 SPF sunscreen (yes, unfortunately I do actually wear this), trying to ward off the roasting sun. As the trail turns to the right and I’m rounding the bend, I see the path open up to an area where a small huddle of people are waiting to ascend. There’s a long ladder lying along the steep hill to take us to the next portion of the hike, but with each hiker, it’s started to slip further off the hill.
