The Kindness Diaries: One Man's Quest to Ignite Goodwill and Transform Lives Around the World

by Logothesis, Leon

  The hard part was I did have money. Just not money on me. I had to keep reminding myself that I was giving back on this journey, otherwise my conscience would have got the better of me. I had long learned that sometimes having a dream means you have to be selfish—you have to do things that aren’t always going to fit your ideals or your conscience or what other people think should be the vision of your life. Having a dream means taking a risk; it means going to dangerous places—whether that be a city called Patna or places within our own hearts. Coming to India with no money wasn’t an easy task. In fact, it was a heartbreaking one. But I also knew it was the only way for me to the meet the rickshaw driver or the riverboat captain. It was the only way for me to meet India.

  I walked back through the festival as the music moved through me, calming my anxiety and igniting my hope that help might still be on its way.

  Then it happened. Again. My bike stopped working on a crowded street. You might be getting used to this, but I wasn’t.

  Anyway, you probably think you know what’s coming. Screaming Indians. Lots of honking. But as I pulled my hulking yellow beast through the mass of sweaty bodies and scooters and, yes, more cows, starting my walk of shame to yet another mechanic’s shop, I noticed that no one was yelling at me. Nobody. In fact, they were smiling, many of them standing back to let me pass. If only my Greek friends had been so kind. I finally stopped to ask someone, “Why are they are not screaming at me? I am used to being screamed at!”

  “The yellow bike they like,” an Indian traveler bellowed at me from his rickety old Vespa. “It’s famous celebrity in India!”

  For a moment, I thought Kindness One’s reputation had begun to precede it, but the man continued, “Famous Bollywood movie film made on yellow bike.”

  It turned out that my bike really was famous. A similar yellow bike (probably a distant cousin of Kindness One) had appeared in a movie, and the revelers of Patna had apparently all seen it, leaving them in a trance as I dragged my defeated motorbike through its crowded streets.

  People patted Kindness One as I walked through the throngs, wobbling their heads and touching me in awe. I was so surprised by the attention that I almost forgot Kindness One’s current condition. A condition that I feared might be terminal.

  All of a sudden, I felt a sense of hope that maybe all this love for Kindness One would give it the energy to start again. I pulled over and got on the bike, ready to hear its little engine roar. Instead what I heard was the dead-end click that had started this latest long and weary chapter. A man saw me struggling and asked in English if I needed a mechanic. Do I need a mechanic? I always need a bloody mechanic!

  After another long day of rejection, this stout man was the angel I had been waiting for. Together we pushed Kindness One two miles to a motorbike repair shop—a shop filled with vintage Royal Enfields. Royal Enfield is a famous English motorcycle that is now a mainstay of India. Like the English cab in Colorado, a little piece of my homeland was calling to me, gently saying, “You are in the right place.”

  I walked up to the mechanic and decided to manifest my own success, informing him, “You saved me. Thank you.”

  He looked confused, which was actually a good sign because it meant he understood me.

  I explained my troubles in English, giving the mechanic and the three assistants that surrounded him the whole story—Los Angeles, New York, Atlantic Ocean, Turkey, cargo plane, India, broken-down bike.

  The mechanic acted as though he heard this tale every day. Turning to the bike, he asked, “So it just won’t start?”

  I sighed, “It just won’t start.”

  The mechanic was right. The whole of my trip mattered little next to that truth.

  He walked around the bike again before announcing, “We’ll have to check it. There are many causes, and it’s not just the spark plugs that we check when the bike is not starting. It could be a lot of things.”

  It could be a lot of things—not the response I was looking for, yet I maintained hope, as only a fool would do, “So can you fix my bike?”

  At this point, more young men had joined the head mechanic. I couldn’t tell if they also worked in the shop or were just intrigued by the pseudo-Bollywood star sitting in the middle of the garage, but the group of them began to wobble their heads in affirmation. I looked to the head mechanic to see if he agreed with his newly arrived sidekicks. He looked up and cocked his head to the right, “Yes.”

  “But there’s one thing I need to tell you . . .” I began.

  After the group heard that I had no money, they all convened to discuss the matter in Hindi. From time to time, one of them would point in my direction—some eyed me like I was a lamb off to the slaughterhouse. Others gestured toward me with more compassion. My fate was in the balance until the head mechanic uttered the two most beautiful sentences on earth: “We can fix it with no money. You are driving famous bike machine.”

  All right, confession time. There was another reason why the mechanics thought I was famous. So far on the trip I had asked my camera crew to hang back, but on this one, I asked them to step forward. I wasn’t just asking these mechanics for a bite to eat. I was asking them for a full-fledged motorbike overhaul. I didn’t know what was wrong with the bike. All I knew was that it was something big that needed to be fixed. And something I was hoping would be fixed that day.

  If that meant bringing out the camera crew, well, sometimes you just got to cheat. And sometimes cheating works. The magic of my little Bollywood star (and my production team) had charmed its way into the hearts of a small army of Indian mechanics.

  Over the next eight hours, they took Kindness One apart. Literally, the bike was lying in pieces all over the dirt floor of the mechanic’s shop. I went outside like a worried relative at the hospital. As I found out, the problem went much deeper than spark plugs (though they weren’t in the best of shape, either). It went right into the filtration system, which, as one of the mechanic’s assistants tried to explain, “was much hardness to fix.” After running for so many days, I didn’t know how to sit still. I spent most of those long hours pacing, hoping that Kindness One might make it out of this alive.

  Finally, one of the mechanics came out and announced, “Sire, we must need presence of your good self.”

  I walked over and asked the head mechanic, “Have you fixed my baby?”

  For the first time all day, he smiled at me with his tobacco-stained teeth. I wanted to kiss him after he replied, “Yes we have fixed it, good friend.”

  We wheeled the bike outside to where we held a ceremony to confirm that Kindness One would start. The bike roared back to life! The deafening applause of the crowd lifted my spirits and followed me as I rode back into the mayhem of Patna’s festival. Though the sun was beginning to set, the crowds had yet to slow. I realized that in all my hours of waiting at the mechanic’s, I had forgotten to secure a place to stay for the night. Motorbike hospitals can have that effect.

  The sun was quickly disappearing, and I had few options as to where to rest for the night. It appeared I had used up all of Patna’s generosity in getting my motorbike fixed, which was fine by me. I was still pinching myself that it was done at all.

  As I drove, looking for one of the quieter streets I could find, I realized how much I had accomplished without any money, without any gas, without a cell phone. I remembered when I was first dating Lina, we were sitting at dinner together, and as was the norm for me back then, she was reading the menu while I was busy scrolling through my phone. Finally, I looked up to find her staring at me.

  “You can have dinner with me,” she said with a sly smile. “Or you can have dinner with your phone. It’s your choice.”

  My phone had become my easy way out from paying attention to the world around me. I would fall down the rabbit hole of emails and text messages and status updates, and I would lose sight of the people right in front
of me. I would fail to hear how their day had gone. I would miss the point when they told me about something they had read or something they had seen. I would ignore that they wanted the one thing from me that I continually spouted that I wanted from others: connection.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but my phone, my computer, all that false connectivity was really just another mask, the way I separated myself from those around me, and here was this woman on one of our first dates saying to me, “Drop the mask.”

  I stopped on a quiet Indian road, Kindness One humming beneath me, and I realized that this is what happens when we drop the mask. We show our best selves, and we invite others to do the same. That day, I had not only seen the generosity of those mechanics and their care for my precious yellow bike, I had also been connected into that extraordinary web of kindness, one that I often failed to see at home, but had found here in India.

  I thought back to Benji’s warning from just that morning: “I got robbed in Patna.” Well, now I was really going to test the city’s kindness. I was going to be sleeping in a yellow motorbike on the side of one of its bustling roads—although sleeping would probably not be the correct word. As I tried to fall into a hazy slumber, I found myself awoken by many festival goers just walking home from the day’s celebration. Some even took photos of the crazy Englishman sleeping in his yellow bike. I couldn’t blame them. We had become quite famous.

  * * *

  If asked, most people probably couldn’t find the country of Bhutan on the map. I couldn’t even find the country of Bhutan on the map. But back when I was looking at the great map of the world that scrolled across the edges of my desk in LA, I noticed one interesting little blip just to the northeast of India, and that blip was Bhutan.

  As I soon found out, Bhutan is not just a brief commercial break in the long TV program known as India. It is also home to the inspiring and equally humbling concept known as “Gross National Happiness.” As soon as I heard the words, I felt like I was back on Hollywood Boulevard, staring at the homeless man’s sign. Bhutan wasn’t just a place I wanted to visit. It was a place that I wanted to make a part of me. It was a place I felt like I was already a part of.

  In Bhutan, they determine the success of their country by the happiness of their people. It’s not about wealth. Or power. Or their GDP. The concept of Gross National Happiness was built on the foundation of how love and kindness are traded between their people, and how that trade—not of money and goods, but of real human connection—brings the one thing you can’t trade: joy.

  But before I made it there, I would have to survive the remaining Indian roads and the many hundreds of miles that still stood between Bhutan and me. What would have been a twelve-hour journey in most other parts of the world, turned into a three-day trek involving stray cows, irate truck drivers, random potholes, and a fleet of wild geese!

  Over the next three days, I saw the map that was once scrolled across my desk come to life. My first stop was in Darjeeling. I don’t think the queen would have been very happy with me if I didn’t pay a visit to the birthplace of Indian tea. I visited a tea farm, drank some delicious local tea, and found a nice Englishman to stay with. But more than that, I found a sense of calm that I had yet to discover in India. My trip seemed to slow down. After running from city to city, I felt my whole body begin to relax as I drove along the rural roads to Bhutan.

  I could feel the stress of the previous few weeks dissipate. The stress of walking a broken-down motorbike through clogged streets, the worry over finding a place to sleep, the fear of being robbed or beaten or worse—all of it seemed to fade away into the deep quiet of the Indian countryside and the steep mountain passes rising up to greet me, gently reminding me of their strength.

  My final night on the road before reaching Bhutan was spent in Kindness One, again. I had been riding for so many hours that I just veered off the Indian death trap—otherwise known to you and me as a road—and fell asleep. Apart from the trucks whizzing past me, it was quite a good night’s rest—as good as can be expected when your life is in the hands of an army of sleep-deprived Indian truck drivers.

  The day I had first found Bhutan on a map, I quickly dashed off an email to a friend, who, through another other contact, connected me to one of the Bhutanese government ministers. They had graciously emailed the minister, explaining my trip and how I felt that Bhutan was my Shangri-la, how it spoke to the very nature of my journey. And how it showed that kindness wasn’t just a gesture between people, but that it could also be the foundation for an entire country.

  After a few weeks, I had nearly forgotten that the email had been sent when we received a response from someone at the Minister of Environment’s office. Even he spoke the language of kindness, explaining in his email that the whole world lives in goodness; cruelty is the distraction. He told me that my story was at the heart of Bhutan’s beliefs and that he couldn’t wait to meet me to hear more about my journey.

  Yes, sometimes the computer can connect people.

  And six months later, there I was in Bhutan. The building where the minister worked was a simple bungalow at the foot of a very tall mountain. I could feel my heart begin to race as I walked into the windowless conference room where we would be meeting.

  When the minister entered the room, I felt the weird yet comforting sense that I had been there before. In many ways, it was like what I had always wanted home to feel like: safe and loving with no judgment or fear. I had ached for this my whole life, and now as I sat across the table talking about a culture that believed in finding the joy in every moment, in creating kindness through connection, I knew that it wasn’t home I had been running from; it was a different kind of home that I had been running to.

  The minister spread out his hands as though to show me the openness of his people, sharing about his country, “You can go to any house, anywhere; they will always welcome you. No matter how poor, they will take out their best for you. They will make you feel at home. They will offer you a bed; they will offer you food; they will offer you a drink. This is the true essence of Gross National Happiness.”

  I understood the concept. I had been experiencing it for months. Kindness and joy danced every day across the world, and as I had seen in Delhi, in Varanasi, in New York, it was often those who offered the most kindness who also seemed to experience the most happiness, despite the poverty or tragedy or desperation they might otherwise face.

  The minister agreed. Touching his heart, he said, “Because it’s coming from here. This is the value system. If we lose it, it’s gone forever. No amount of money in the world can bring it back.”

  I had seen that, too—most particularly in myself. And maybe that is why even in the moments when I was most embarrassed to be traveling through such impoverished communities with no money in my pocket, I knew that I couldn’t have done this trip any other way. As much as everyone in the world should have clean water to drink, and safe and stable roofs over their heads, and an education for their children, below that, deep in the cement of our foundation as human beings, is a happiness that cannot be bought.

  As the minister clarified, Bhutan didn’t celebrate Gross Individual Happiness; they celebrated Gross National Happiness.

  He sat back in his chair and nodded in my direction as he explained, “But know it is not just here in Bhutan that kindness occurs. People are changing everywhere; society is changing, and so the focus changes.”

  “You’re a very wise man,” I replied, having seen those same changes in myself—not just in who I was, but also in how I viewed the world.

  “No,” the minister laughed. “I just pay attention.”

  But maybe wisdom really is just paying attention.

  The small moments, the small acts, the small changes. We always think that change needs to come in broad strokes. That in order to follow your dreams, you need to get on a yellow motorbike to cross the world on kindness, b
ut maybe the real epiphany is to pay attention to all the dreams unfolding around us. If I could make one promise to myself, I decided it would be this: when I got home, I would leave the bloody phone alone. I would pay attention. I would let my heart break open a little more. I would allow myself to be happy.

  * * *

  I left the building and drove through the winding mountains and draped greenery of the Bhutanese countryside. I could feel small drops of dew on my face, the wet breeze through my jacket, cooling my skin. I could hear the faint revving of trucks and cars moving behind me on the narrow pass. I decided I wanted to meet one of the citizens of Bhutan. I wanted to see Gross National Happiness in the flesh, and because I’m a bit of a cynic at times, I wanted to test the minister’s assertion that, “You can go to any house, anywhere, they will always welcome you.”

  I pulled up to a small farmhouse and saw a man on a tractor. I quickly found out that he didn’t speak great English (although it was probably better than my Bhutanese). He sent me to speak to his son, Bikash, who was in his early twenties and spoke enough English for us to communicate.

  After I told Bikash about my quest, he immediately invited me inside for some tea, and as we sat in his warm living room next to a burning fire, while the weather outside grew darker with rain, I asked him about his own experience with Gross National Happiness.

  Bikash smiled broadly, as though I had just brought up his favorite football team: “Different people have different opinions about Gross National Happiness. For me, it’s being at home with my family, having three meals in a day. My family is happy. This means happiness to me.”

  “So happiness equals simplicity?” I asked.

  “Yes, exactly,” he replied.

  “We should tell the rest of the world that.”

  “Yes, we should,” Bikash laughed.

  So I am telling you now. In fact, I am telling myself now, lest I forget again. Happiness equals simplicity. It’s so easy to want to complicate life, to think that happiness is an impossibly long calculus equation that only the truly brilliant or truly successful or truly spiritual can solve, but I realized that if a half-educated chap like me could achieve it, maybe the formula wasn’t so complicated, after all.