Dear Anya, 

There is a school right outside my office window. They have a clock tower attached to the building, except the clock is ornamental. Every time I look at it, the arms indicate 10 after 10. With every glance, I secretly hope it will start moving, yet it remains stuck. No amount of yearning will make it move. 

I’m currently stuck, but for the first time in my life, I don’t know where to go. I’m at a movie theater, and as the movie is reaching its predictable cliché of a climax, the screen goes blank, and the lights turn on. I sit there in a daze, unsure if the movie will continue or if I should leave. The clock is still at 10 after 10. 

In the third grade, my teacher got me a set of Parker pens. He thought I had potential and wrote me a letter declaring that I would one day make a great writer. The original set went unused. They’re still in their original box, rotting away in obscurity.

People have told me I’m destined to do great things for over a decade. I fell for it. I told myself that my life’s mission was to create something beautiful. That something was never defined, but I said I would point at that thing one day and say, “I made that beautiful thing.”

When I went into policy and public service, I thought it was my lucky break. I could finally create that beautiful thing; the intangible started to take shape. I could live a life of kindness, and for a while, I did. I was on my way; the clock should be moving soon, I thought —naively. 

Yet, as I sit here today in my office, people loudly celebrating Trump’s victory, I doubt if kindness really exists around us. Are we all vile creatures underneath, eager to step over anyone to gain a sliver of power or money? Am I what I present myself to be? A public servant trying to do what’s best? Or am I simply another cog in the machine of cruelty? I look around, see suffering and injustice, and wonder what kind of house I helped build. 

While I am still ambivalent about my place in the world and where I should go next, I know for certain the effect your presence and your kindness had on my life. I remember vividly waiting outside your office door, shaking and quivering, my anxiety at its height, wondering if you would let me submit an assignment late because of my circumstances. I felt guilt and shame. My mind telling me I had let you down. That I’m using mental illness to get away with things. 

As soon as I stepped into the office, I was welcomed with a smile and stacks of books arranged in every angle. While I stumbled through my sentences, trying to give an excuse that I was not convinced of myself, you offered me banana bread. You did not ask me for medical reports and official letters, but you did ask me if I wanted to take a walk in the park. My anxieties were still there but were being peeled down layer by layer. You allowed me space to express my worries, validated my concerns instead of discrediting them, and reassured me that there are still opportunities to make up for what was lost —the banana bread definitely helped. 

To choose kindness is often a solitary path. When you offer kindness to others, you offer pieces of a finite resource that you have; you offer pieces of your soul. No matter how small these pieces are, even if microscopic, they remain prone to depletion. Yet to abandon kindness is to succumb to the existential dread, to become one with the shadowy figures. To accept the cruelty is deliverance from the illusions of kindness. To be liberated from the suffocating burden of guilt. To grant oneself the sinister liberty of exploitation and selfishness.

Whenever I ask myself which choice to make, my interaction with you that day—in addition to many others—reminds me of the kindness present in this world. Even though the world might seem cruel, someone like you will still choose kindness over the many other seductive choices. Every time we are kind, it is an extension of the kindness offered to us. 

Knowing you, Anya, traces of your kindness go beyond me and beyond the walls of our university, and extensions of your kindness undoubtedly have crossed continents. Thanks to you, Anya, I know that whether I choose to stay or leave the movie theater, or whatever beautiful thing I might create or not create, I can still leave traces of kindness wherever I may go. For that, countless others and I are eternally grateful. 

With love and adoration,
Tarek