When despair, fear, exhaustion and external answers beyond the encouragement to “keep on keeping on” are all: when the terror of occupational “redundancy” strips one’s sense of personal contribution, of meaning to others- what is left?

The harsh formula of winner-loser is clear: this is no tv game show proclaiming, you are the weakest link: it is real: savings halved. Job gone. Obligations mounting in the broken strategies of once-sound household finance.

It could be us. It could be me. It is, in fact. We, I, can do nothing (but wait for Obama, Godot , and the Second Coming). We, I, have practiced “nothing doing” for years on the homeless, why not our fallen neighbors? Turn away.

Yes, they’ve see it. We do too: narrowing our eyes, so that the squint clarifies our bounded horizons. We are all vulnerable. We are all afraid. We too are determined by our markets, though we believe our determinations to be granted by higher gifts—our intelligence, charm, wisdom….

Adam Phillips has written a marvelous essay on kindness, published in the Guardian. Kindness has fallen on hard times. Its been reduced to a squinty eyed calculus of “what’s in it for me” – either as the condescending benefactor or the needy recipient. As a human quality, it has fallen into the cook-pot of narcissism: a reflection of winning or losing.

But looking closer, we see that narcissism of the self-serving kind become possible only after the primary narcissism of the self-preservative kind. Adam Phillips, citing Donald Winnicott, reminds us that the giving and taking of kindnesses— the kindnesses of mutual interdependency rather than our cynical reductions of kindness to the absence and presence of power— are what make us human.

However fearful, exhausted, despairing, both the accepting and extending of kindness remain very human and very necessary capabilities. Especially now.

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