Day 10

Set your 15 minute timer. You can go in as deep as you like and the alarm will bring you back round soon enough. You're not gonna get lost in there.

Write without fear. Or write with fear but ignore that little bastard. What is the raw, strange magic of you? What are the things you know?

These things I know. Kindness is the most important quality and yet it seems to be in short supply, even in those who have every experience that should lead to empathy. Also kindness can lurk in the most unexpected places. I have seem someone I downright loathe show greater kindness than I ever could, who used her words carefully to correct the course of another who had lost her empathy through sheer frustration. 

I have seen kindness cripple people, leave them washed up and exhausted but raise their heads and continue to fight the good fight. I have watched a woman in tears as she told me of the black mould creeping up the walls of a child’s bedroom and into her lungs and she shared her frustration at the cruelty of a society that doesn’t immediately rush to stop such horrors. 

I have seen kindness shared with people who never never deserved it and I have seen some of those bloom and others cut kindness down where it stands, burning every bridge as they blaze with fury at a world that doesn’t care, even when it is showing them it does.

These things I know. How you look doesn’t show who you are. How clever you are is not the most important thing. If we make space for kindness, not progression as the primary value of our society then we are making space for success for so many more people. People with learning disabilities make the world a better place. They make the world better for our children and for the rest of us. There would be no soft play centres without people with l

earning disabilities. Learning in school would still only happen when seated at a a desk. If we focussed the technological expertise we devote to war to developing new ways of supporting people with disabilities to fully engage with their world then the whole world would be better, though probably a little poorer. War breeds money but kindness breeds itself. 

These things I know. The look in a parent’s eyes when you tell them their child has autism. The slump of the shoulders in a mother who just can’t breast feed their premature child. The defiant head tilt of the mother of a child with down syndrome who will not take no for an answer. The despair on the face of a father who tells me he’s not crying as tears run down his cheeks as his son’s seizures spike for the third time in three years and he knows the terrible path he has to walk down again. The confusion on the face of a grandmother when I intervene to stop her force feeding a toddler when she knows she’s only doing what’s best. The rapid speech and complex language of the teacher who feels threatened by yet another person invading her classroom with a pen and clipboard to write yet more notes on her practice. (For the record I am only ever there to see the child, your practice is always respected by me, even if I don’t agree with all of it.)