Snow makes us nice(r).
Treetops covered in snow, beneath a white sky. Photo credit: Matthew Henry.
This weekend was a doozy in Toronto.
We had the kind of snowfall that goes all day and then overnight — the kind that makes everything outside surreal and playful. Cars become massive molars lining the street, schoolyard equipment bright white dinosaurs frozen in space. Footprints become disappearing paths to somewhere sacred.
It’s a little scary, how fast things change. Like a teacher suddenly announcing a pop quiz and we’re like — “What? Not fair!” but here we are with our little pencils or shovels trying to find our way through.
And in the swirling chaos of it, kindness shows up.
Every person who walks by when I’m shovelling wants to say hi. We toss little sentences over the snowbanks like, “Holy shit, right?” “Wild one!”
I lift and drop shovelfuls, again and again, trying to clear the sidewalk, but half of it cascades back over me into a whirlpool of flickering crystals. When I turn, the walkway is impassable again. So back and forth I go, then the neighbours’ places too.
The social scientist Robert Putnam has this term I think about a lot — “generalized reciprocity.”
This is different from “specific reciprocity” which is like: “I’ll pay for lunch, and you’ll pay next time.” It’s capitalism or barter or exchange.
“Generalized reciprocity” is something else completely. We do things with no expectation of something coming back to us. We just give and receive because we can, because we know that it makes us stronger to be good to each other.
So when I’ve shovelled out four houses and my neighbour Rosa appears on her porch with a plate of warm potatoes and cabbage covered in foil, it feels both welcome and unnecessary. I thank her profusely and carry it inside, the steam melting the ice off my eyelashes. Rosa’s potatoes are the world’s best.
Early Covid was the first time I saw generalized reciprocity happening in a big way. All those concerts on porches and offers to pick up prescriptions. It felt like a new life force was weaving through us… And in writing that, I don’t want to diminish the extreme pain and precarity of those months, but within that pain, so many of us found a doorway back to another way of being together.
A big dump of snow can give us a similar doorway.
This is how it feels to me when I’m in very supportive writing workshops. When each voice matters, and there’s no need for scarcity or competition. Vulnerability becomes easy, because we know we’re all in it together. We lift each other up because we know it helps us all.
Writing in the world today is its own kind of snow storm.
There is so much telling us we shouldn’t express ourselves tenderly and bravely. Again and again, we get snowed under with self-doubt and criticism. Again and again, we hide out inside where it’s warm and safe.
But we can shovel each other out. We can drop off warm food. We can lower the barriers, and lead each other back to our material.
These days I have a shovel, and enough back strength to do more than my share. I won’t always. But I hope I can always access the kind of kindness that opens that door. I hope I can always remember what it feels like to be in the flow of generous reciprocity. I hope I can keep building community from there, wherever I am.
It’s a really weird time in the world to talk about kindness.
I know.
The same day I was eating warm potatoes and feeling good about clearing sidewalks, I was also immobilized in bed watching videos of the violence on protesters.
Maybe these forces have always lived side by side — kindness and its adversaries. Maybe holding them in our hands together reminds us why making tiny spaces of reciprocity matters, no matter how local and liminal.
As adrienne maree brown says, “Small is good. Small is all.” I wish I could shovel away mass incarceration, the hard crust on so many politicians’ hearts, the hatred and violence that only seems to grow.
But today I can shovel sidewalks for all the elderly neighbours in my block. And a pathway is a pathway. A tiny start. A path forward. A way of moving a little more freely.
In it with you,
