kindness friday by Caleb M. '27
and affording myself a little bit of grace
Raise your hand if you love exams!
Is your hand up?
Yeah, neither is mine.
Mid-October01 sometimes blogs take a long time to write, okay? at MIT is the time of Midterms Week 1, the first of three weeks of exams (not including Finals) that you will encounter over the course of one semester at MIT. And lucky me; that week I had three exams: 24.90302 Language and Its Structure III: Semantics and Pragmatics on Tuesday, 6.39003 Introduction to Machine Learning on Wednesday… and 6.1220, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, on Thursday. And let me tell you. If Aiden was expecting? I’m at 9 months. I’m in labor. It was a beating.
But let’s go a bit further back, to that Monday, the precipice of the horror story that I knew was going to ensue. I was maybe probably studying but, more importantly, I was thinking about what I was going to do once the week was over. Just knowing what 6.1220 is like, I was relatively sure that I was probably not going to be very happy with myself or how the exam went, and I couldn’t pour endless hours into prep because of the other two exams I had to handle. So, what did I do instead of wallowing?
Planned on getting myself a bouquet of flowers, of course!
I’ve been really into flowers recently. Not in an intellectual sense, that is; I’ve just been enjoying decorating my room with them. My dorm is already quite colorful, but it needed something to give it a bit more warmth, a bit more life, and I’ve found flowers to be the perfect solution. Their color and life brings the beauty that surrounds me in every moment to my home. Their transience is the perfect reminder that life is short, that we find the divine in death’s immediacy—we share our ephemerality, the flowers and I. Monday afternoon, I had gone to a farmers market in Cambridge and got myself a stunning bouquet of dahlias, then stopped by Goodwill to get myself a cute vase before performative-male-ing my way back to my dorm and arranging my new blossoms in their home atop my closet.
So, later that night as I was dreading the incoming slaughter of 6.1220 Exam 1, I decided that I was going to treat myself once I’d made it through with another bouquet. Because you know what? I think I deserve to show myself a bit of kindness after making it through that. I knew I was gonna be down on myself on Friday for the previous night, but I also was aware that aiming negativity at oneself because of an exam never saved anyone, so I decided to give myself a little something to look forward to once I made it through my professors’ brief stint as executioners.
As the week continued and the first two exams came and went, I found myself coming up with more and more ideas of things I could do that Friday. Maybe I could get a little treat for myself at Flour. Or perhaps I could get a meal with a friend. All the things I could do to put a smile on my own face—and the faces of the people around me! Because we all need a bit of love around midterms, no?
As these awesome ideas kept coming to mind, I decided that I needed to make this more than just a few little tasks—it was going to be a whole day affair of handing out kindness, and receiving kindness, and most pressingly giving kindness to myself. And with this theme in mind, the name came easy: Kindness Friday.
The first objective of Kindness Friday was to get breakfast with my dear friend, Sydney P. ‘27. To be entirely honest, I don’t get breakfast as often as I’d like to, but I know that the first step in a good day is the most important meal of the day, so Sydney and I convened at 8 AM in Simmons Dining and had breakfast before her first lecture. It was nice to meet up and just chat—we hadn’t seen each other super often in the weeks prior, and I adore all my friends, so it was wonderful to just be able to enjoy each others’ presences over some Simmons bacon and home fries.
My goal for Kindness Friday was to get 8 hours of sleep. Sleep, I have found, is as crucially important as everybody loves to insist it is. Does that mean I’m going to get as much sleep as I should as consistently as I should every night? Absolutely not. Nonetheless, I was going to be a good college boy and get my prescribed 1/3rd of the day in bed… or so I had planned. Unfortunately, I had to finish a Problem Set for 24.903 the night before, so I’d only gotten to bed at… 4 AM. Oops. But, hey—after breakfast with Sydney, I didn’t have anything else to do for a good few hours, so I just scampered back up my ladder and got under my covers for another 4 hours, thus achieving my goal of 8 hours of rest!
After waking up at around 1 PM, I got out of bed and finally prepared for Kindness Friday! The day prior for my exam I’d dressed in all black—black ski pants, black boots, black button down under a black sweater—and so for Kindness Friday, I decided to contrast that by wearing all white:04 I’d like to take a moment here to assert that I abhor the dichotomy of black being the color of sadness and depression and white being the representation of purity and joy. That is not what guided my choice here. I wear all black after I pull all-nighters or when I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about my outfit, such as on days that I have exams, because all black (and maybe silver accents) always looks good enough, and then I wanted to contrast that outfit for Kindness Friday, which was of course supposed to be the opposite of the exam. white khakis, white shoes, white pullover over a tan tee, and my Gold Rat to lock in the extra-special-ness of the day. So, a deep shower and a deep breath later, I stepped out the door to really start my adventure of kindness!
My next order of business after waking back up was going to recitation. There’s actually a detail that I opted to leave out here: I had two recitations to attend on Fridays, 6.390 at 2 PM and 6.1220 at 3 PM. You can see here, however, that only the latter of these was a task for Kindness Friday. That is because, dear reader, there is an implicit task that I failed to list in this note on my phone: skip 390 recitation.
Am I a bad kid? Yes, perhaps a little. But here was my logic: I did not want to go to 390 recitation. 390 recitation would make me sad. I was comfortable with the material we would be reviewing in 390 recitation. Going to 390 recitation would not be an act of kindness to myself. Comparatively, I knew that I should go to 1220 recitation—kindness is, after all, not indulgence. 1220 recitation would be useful because the material was difficult. Going to 1220 recitation would make me feel better prepared for the next exam after what I’d been through the night prior. Going to 1220 recitation would be an act of kindness to myself.
Thus, I packed my canvas tote bag with my spiral, laptop, and water bottle and sauntered off to Building 32 for a recitation on Flow Networks. Did I understand completely? …yeah, right. But I feel like going nonetheless was important, and I was definitely more comfortable with the material than I would’ve been if I hadn’t gone at all, so this was a big win for me and Kindness Friday! I’m such a good student, no?
i didn’t say i had to know what recitation was about…
Once I made it out of recitation, class was over for the day, which meant it was time to get to the task that started this whole affair…
The first vase that I got for myself at the beginning of the week was, as mentioned, from the Goodwill in Central Cambridge. When I was walking around Central that day, however, I noticed a beautiful array of vases in Boomerang’s, another thrift in Cambridge. Thus, for my second bouquet, I decided that I was going to search for its new home with a stop by Boomie’s.
That is, of course, until I arrived and realized that all of Boomerang’s bouquets were filled with fake flowers.
I abhor fake flowers. You know how I have this whole “life is short” thing? I think that real flowers are similar to life in that way—there is something so beautiful in their brevity, in that their vibrance is limited. They don’t exist as this infinite spectacle but derive such beauty from their growth and ultimate wilting. They have aesthetic value in their immediate appearance but also another layer of wonder in their transience, and I find life to be much the same. Fake flowers spit in the face of that entire idea. They exist to serve our desire for immortalization, to avoid thinking about the inevitability of ending. They’re like an overused camera, solely existing to stretch out the present as long as one can instead of simply existing within it. Perhaps fake flowers never die, but they also never bloom. Living is about blooming.
More importantly, however, these flowers seemed to be superglued into the cases at Boomerang’s, so I wouldn’t have been able to buy them to use the cases anyway. Thus, I went back to Goodwill and grabbed another classic glass vase for my new bouquet.
For the flowers themselves, I stopped by Target and got a big bouquet and one smaller one, both autumnal colors—red, orange, and yellow in a plethora of forms, roses and carnations and more—and threw them in my tote bag for a bit more of a walk. There was one more place I wanted to stop by in Central before the evening came, and that was in preparation for…
Similar to breakfast, I wanted to spend another piece of Kindness Friday with someone I cared about, and thus I asked my very dear friend Noah R. ‘27 if he’d like to get dinner with me that evening. He, of course, obliged, and thus I had to find some place to go to dinner on a nice Friday afternoon in autumn.
Thus, after grabbing my flowers at Target, I saw that it was just about 5 PM and thus took a quick jaunt through Cambridge over to the one and only Cicada. Cicada is a Vietnamese café in the morning turned restaurant in the evening and it is absolutely divine. I need to wake up in the morning one day and get their sea salt shaker. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. Anyway. Cicada closes midday between 2 and 5 PM, so right when it reopened I stopped by to ask if they had a table for 2 around 6, reasoning that going in person might fare better than just calling or looking at their website. After a bit of searching through their system, they thankfully told me that they had two seats at the bar at 6:30, so I put my name down and sauntered back on to Simmons to arrange my bouquet.
As 6 PM came to pass, Noah came over to Simmons and the two of us made our way over to Cicada. Dinner was, of course, wonderful—I got the duck pho, and Noah got …something that I can’t find the name of right now. Cut me some slack, this was five months ago. We also got some viet yogurt which was, similarly, divine.
But, more importantly, we talked. We talked for a while. We caught up from not seeing each other as much in the few weeks prior, I told him about Kindness Friday, he told me about a girl. It was really nice. It’s always a good time to spend time with people you love.
But, unfortunately, dinner had to end, and after our walk back to Simmons we said our goodbyes, which was when I started my next task…
This one was easy because I’m, thankfully, surrounded by things I love.
Sydney also got me a gift for Kindness Friday—I love tea, so on her trip to Target she got me a case of Hot Cinnamon Sunset, a tea that I believe is actually just cinnamon but is really quite tasty. Surrounded by love, surrounded by kindness.
After spending an hour or two sitting around with friends chatting, I looked at the clock and somehow it was already 10 PM! And that meant that I had one hour before the Z05 The Zesiger Center, MIT’s campus gym/rec center closed, and my regular workouts took an hour, so I had to hustle! I’ve been trying to go to the gym more consistently for the past few months—my weekly regimen is ideally Push day on Mondays, Pull on Wednesdays, and Legs on Fridays—and I knew I’d feel better by getting a workout in after not making good on that commitment for a couple weeks prior, so I rushed off to the Z and got a solid leg day in. If you’re interested, here are the details on that…
It’s good to feel good about myself, and I feel good about myself when I hit the gym—perfectly in the spirit of Kindness :)!
Back from the gym, there was only one thing left to do to close out this day of self-love…
This one requires a bit of backstory.
One Friday night, long long ago when I was but a freshman, I was sitting in my Maseeh triple and looking out the window to the September evening and feeling still. Immensely, consumingly still. But stillness felt not like peace, but like stagnation; immobility. I was living in the big city06 Boston feels like the big city when you’re from the suburbs for the first time—autonomy in hand, world in front of me, and I was choosing to sit in my bed. That was absolutely not how I carried myself—you know I think life is short.
Thus, I decided I was going to bike to the beach. I didn’t know which beach, and I didn’t know how I was going to get there, but I did know that a. I was in a city on the water and b. I could reasonably BlueBike07 once a bluebike warrior always a bluebike warrior anywhere I wanted, and that was about all I needed to know to change out of my pajamas, walk over to the Maseeh BlueBike station, check out a bike, and disappear into the darkness.
I biked, and I biked, and I biked. I biked east for about an hour, past skyscrapers and over bridges and through empty residential areas and along unlit streets until I reached my destination that I had pretty randomly selected by looking at the map of Boston: City Point Beach.
City Point Beach is a small beach nestled behind residential South Boston. It’s a long, thin strip that shapes a circle around Pleasure Bay, which is a… bay… near the airport. It’s a very serene spot, and I’m not sure if many people go during the day but I can say that at night it was completely empty, and it was close enough to Logan that you could see the planes landing in and flying out every few minutes.
I remember parking my BlueBike and walking onto the strip of sand, looking north and south on the sharp, clear night to notice something that I’d remember for years to come…
The lifeguard chair.
One of the few things that wasn’t sand at City Point was a tall lifeguard chair—or, maybe chair isn’t the right term. It was more of a lifeguard bench, suspended 8 feet off the air and looking straight over the water. Precisely two seats, separated by a bar of an armrest. It was so beautiful. It was so beautiful.
I remember climbing onto that chair and sitting for a while, listening to music, looking out over the water. I remember thinking about how nice it would be to be there with somebody. I remember hoping that a day would come where I could bring someone I loved to that very seat, and sit there, and look out into the water and watch the planes landing in Logan and just be there together.
From that moment forward, City Point Beach became “my spot.” I thought it was such a romantic little corner of the world, and I felt like I was the only person who knew about it. When the right moment—the right person—came, I would text: hey, do you want to go out biking with me one of these days? And they would say, sure, to where? And I would say, oh, I know this beach in south boston that i really like… and then we’d bike off southeast on two crappy BlueBikes until we got to that beach and climbed into that chair and sat there together and listened to music and just held each other there, stable in space. Sharing a secret, and a little bit of love.
Shocker—that never happened. I’ve only ever mustered up the courage to invite exactly one person to City Point, and then our schedules didn’t align right and we never made it out there. I loved more than enough, but maybe I was never in love enough, or maybe I was never brave enough. Who knows?
Nonetheless, I spent two years waiting for the perfect moment to return to this beach and, thus, hadn’t actually visited it again in that entire time. And so, for the end of Kindness Friday, in my last act of self-love, I decided to take myself to City Point—to finally think that I could be enough to deserve to exist in that beauty, to sit in that chair and watch the waves and the planes and revel in something that I thought was too pretty for me to see alone.
So, once I came back from the gym, I walked over to the Maseeh BlueBike station, checked out a bike, and disappeared into the darkness. I biked east for about an hour, past skyscrapers and over bridges and through empty residential areas and along unlit streets until I reached the destination I’d been hoping to find myself at for two long years: City Point Beach.
It looked exactly as I had left it. The sky was just as still, the stars shining just as bright, the waves just as motive, and the lifeguard chair…
The lifeguard chair?
Where was the lifeguard chair?
I looked north, and south. I looked up and down the thin strip of sand. I walked a few minutes one way, then back, and a few minutes, the other way, and back. But it was completely gone.
I felt a lot of ways about that—but I didn’t know exactly where to put them. So what did I do? I crossed the street to the skating rink nearby. I grabbed one of the Adirondack chairs out front. I dragged it across the road and deep into the sand until it was right by the water. I sat down. I turned on my music. I pulled out my journal… and I began to write.
Happy Kindness Friday!
Forgive my handwriting… it’s a bit dark here at City Point Beach.
The chair is gone.
This is actually probably the most metaphorically rich, just, and beautiful ending to Kindness Friday insofar as the pursuit of loving me.
1. Life is short. We can’t wait for the perfect moment forever—instead, we task ourselves with making the moment perfect. Blink and you’ll miss it; wait and it’s gone.
2. I don’t need it, because beauty can be enjoyed fully by me and just me. The chair tied this beach to romance, not love. This is an adventure in love.
3. The forest for the trees. City Point is still beautiful, chair or no chair. It is still serene. It is still the beach. The chair made it “pretty,” but it’s beautiful nonetheless.
4. So much has changed. I have grown in ways that are impossible to qualify in the past two years. I am a vastly different person than I was last time I was here. This place is different too. Time has its eyes on all of us.
There’s more. It’s not obvious how to write it down, exactly. But there is something so right about the chair being gone.
5. An unguarded adventure—there is no one watching me to hold me back from embarking in fear, from hurting. We are each others’ lifeguards.
This beach doesn’t just have to be mine in love. It can be mine always. It is beautiful, always.
I only sort of stole this chair, and I’ll return it soon.
6. Love is crafted just as much if not imperatively more than it is found.
I am enough to deserve love and beauty as I am, in my independence, nothing more or less.
I brought myself here to show myself that. I waited for two years to find someone I thought would be deserving of seeing this, of sharing in this secret, magic beauty built for two. Little did I know, beauty is built for no one. It’s for two, and none, and many and none. I behold this beauty not because I gift it to someone but because I finally find that I am enough to gift it to.
The tide is approaching me rapidly. Even as I am still, the unknown lurches towards me—and so, I lurch towards it, ready to take another step in fear and love and mystery and hope.
The chair is gone, and I couldn’t be happier.
Happy Kindness Friday.08 hey guys. P.S. when i got home i actually knocked into my friend megan and then we hung out for a while. and then i went to purchase and then eat an entire pizza with my other friend trevor. perfect end to kindness friday but i preferred this dramatic ending for the blog LOL. thanks for reading :)
- sometimes blogs take a long time to write, okay? back to text ↑
- Language and Its Structure III: Semantics and Pragmatics back to text ↑
- Introduction to Machine Learning back to text ↑
- I’d like to take a moment here to assert that I abhor the dichotomy of black being the color of sadness and depression and white being the representation of purity and joy. That is not what guided my choice here. I wear all black after I pull all-nighters or when I don’t want to spend too much time thinking about my outfit, such as on days that I have exams, because all black (and maybe silver accents) always looks good enough, and then I wanted to contrast that outfit for Kindness Friday, which was of course supposed to be the opposite of the exam. back to text ↑
- The Zesiger Center, MIT’s campus gym/rec center back to text ↑
- Boston feels like the big city when you’re from the suburbs back to text ↑
- once a bluebike warrior always a bluebike warrior back to text ↑
- hey guys. P.S. when i got home i actually knocked into my friend megan and then we hung out for a while. and then i went to purchase and then eat an entire pizza with my other friend trevor. perfect end to kindness friday but i preferred this dramatic ending for the blog LOL. thanks for reading :) back to text ↑