WATCH: Emma Thompson reads “kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
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WATCH: Emma Thompson reads “kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Updated | By East Coast Radio

The world can do with a little more kindness, now more than ever. 

Kindness
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Game of Thrones Star, Emila Clark, asked the renowned actress Emma Thompson to read a beautiful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. The reading gave us goosebumps, and we had to share the video with you. 

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Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, songwriter, and novelist. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother. Naomi began composing her first poem at the age of six. According to Poetry Out Loud, Nye often writes about everyday life while addressing cultural issues. 

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Emma Thompson dedicated the poem to our collective future, to who we are going to be. In a year that feels like a never-ending rollercoaster ride, the world can do with a little more kindness. Kindness toward ourselves and compassion toward those around us. 

Watch Emma Thompson reading the poem:

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The ever glorious and wonderful Emma Thompson reads “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye. Emma would like to dedicate this poem to our future selves, who we will be after this pandemic. What a glorious sentiment that is, filled to the brim with hope. What we need, what we always need, most. Here is the prescription as written in @thepoetrypharmacy @thepoetryremedy. Condition: Need for Kindness There are times in life when everything we thought we could rely on fails, and everything we have wanted for ourselves dissolves in front of us. There are times, also, when we are confronted with the same suffering in others. Faced with the sheer scale of the misery of the world, it can be agonizingly difficult to engage meaningfully- and all too tempting simply to harden our hearts against it. Yet, as Naomi Shihab Nye tells us in this inspiring poem, those moments- hard as they are- are also an opportunity, if we will only dare to open our hearts. For it is only by reckoning with true sorrow and desolation that we can come to understand exactly how necessary, how life-preserving, kindess really is, and then move towards it. First, however, we must learn true empathy. ‘Kindness’, after all, is just another word for love- and once we’ve acknowledged that the pain of others is exactly as searing as our own, what can we do but love them? What can we do but try to ease their burden? As Nye so wonderfully suggests, nothing else makes sense. This is a challenge. Even at our lowest points, we must not ignore the suffering of others: we must not allow the solipsism of personal misery to cut us off from the great cloth of human feeling. Yet it is also a consolation: if we reject that isolation, we can take comfort in knowing that whatever loss lays us bare will also bring us into the presence of kindness. By looking pain in the eye, we can find the kindness needed to reach out not only to others, but to ourselves, as well. It will tie our shoes for us; it will lead us back into the world when everything else has abandoned us. So gaze unflinchingly into the bright light of loss, and let kindness be unleashed from you like a soothing shadow. Big Thank you Big Em! 🥰🕊🙌

A post shared by @ emilia_clarke on

Main image courtesy of iStock

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