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

by Logothesis, Leon

  Alex told me that ever since he left fencing, he had hoped to become a master himself someday. “To be a fencing master will be one of my dreams. Yes, I wish to be as Dario. I wish to transmit the same positive attitude for life and for the sport that I learn from him.”

  I smiled, already knowing my next gift. “So you want to give back to the kids what Dario gave to you?”

  He paused before explaining, “Yes. But let me be honest—I learned from my winning, but I also learn from my defeat. It’s easy to win. Sometimes it’s not easy to be defeated. You put your problems under your mask, and in fencing whether you win, whether you lose, you still shake your hand with your opponent.”

  He looked down and as though it was happening right in front of me, I saw his own mask drop. The happy, gregarious man I had met in the square allowed me into the inner life that dwells within us all—the fire, the spirit, the secret places where we hold those dreams and those fears. I watched as he brought down the facade he wore behind the fencer’s mask. I saw him not just as who he presented himself to be, but also as who he really was, and I wanted to honor both of those men.

  That night, I had dinner with Alex and his family, and saw what a good teacher he was to his own child, spending time with her before tucking her into bed. I stayed on their couch, and then the next morning, Alex and I spoke over breakfast at his apartment. I asked him, “Do you still want to be a fencing master?”

  Alex hesitated, “Leon, some people, they dream of things they do not have. And some, you know, they accepts the dream they do, the life they have now.”

  “But what if I said,” I paused, trying to see how to offer this gift. “What if I could help you? I want to help you become a Master in Fencing. Whatever you need to become that. Whatever might help—classes, equipment . . .”

  Alex stopped. He didn’t say anything at first. Instead, he just looked down at the ground. If we had been in a fencing match, I would have had no clue as to his next move.

  “Grazie, Leon,” he nodded, “Really, this mean so much.”

  “I just thought if this is what you wanted to do and you—”

  Alex cut me off, putting his hand on my arm as he explained, “No, please, it is very kind.” He paused before continuing, “But it would not help me.”

  At first, I was confused, but then Alex explained, “You see, if I was to be a good master, that mean I would first need to take care for my student.”

  I nodded, trying to understand what Alex was saying. “You see, I know this young man, this student, and he is the one that needs help. Not me.”

  Alex explained that there was a young boy who had lost his father and couldn’t afford the clothes and equipment for fencing. Without someone stepping in he would be forced to give up the chance to become the man he was destined to be.

  Alex finished arguing his case, “Because for me fencing master was kind of a father, sometimes better than a father, that I lost for a lot of years. I think that this could be a marvelous gift for Angelo, that he will now never see his father, but he will know forever a fencing master.”

  No one had yet asked that his gift be given to someone else. I was absolutely humbled by Alex’s request, barely able to reply. All I could say was, “Done.”

  He gave me a long and heartfelt hug, “Thank you, Leon. Thank you very much, friend.”

  I walked back to Kindness One, happy to discover that she was ticket-free.

  I got on my yellow magic friend, and we began to drive back through the city of Trieste, on our way out of Italy and into Bosnia. Life is filled with uncertainty, but one thing is certain: The universe has an interesting plan. Because if a shy, acne-riddled young boy hadn’t met a kindhearted American Doctor in London all those years ago, then Angelo wouldn’t have had the chance to continue his training. I was taught that by believing in others, we give them the gift of knowing how to believe in someone else. We break through the cacophony of criticism and fear, of heartache and insults, of the masks we are all forced to wear, and we remind each other that we are all special and that our talents are unlimited.

  Chapter Five

  “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”

  —African Proverb

  I remember once reading a lecture that the great writer Joseph Campbell gave at the beginning of World War II. In it, he reminded his students, “Permanent things, of course, do not have to be fought for—they are permanent. Rather, it is our privilege to experience them. And it is our private loss if we neglect them.”

  My own grandfather fought in World War II, and I remember my father telling me stories about how at one point, many Brits truly believed that London would be destroyed, a city left in rubble, its people cowed under the tyranny of the Nazis. But though many brave men fought during those years to save the ones they loved, those permanent things—their histories, their cultures, their homes—could not be destroyed.

  As I rode across Europe, heading out of Italy—the Alps to my north—and entering Slovenia, I couldn’t help but think of all the wars that had marked this land. In many ways, there was far less history in America by comparison. Of course, war had happened—people had died on its soil—but the history of Europe was filled with centuries of turmoil. Too many people, too many nations fighting over their histories, their cultures, and their homes.

  I made a pit stop in Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. There, I stayed with a schoolteacher and his family. The only request was from his eight-year-old son, Janek, who asked that if I ever chronicled my journeys I would mention him. So, here you go, Janek. Thanks for letting me sleep on your parents’ couch, and don’t forget to be nice to your sisters!

  From there, I continued on to Croatia, arriving in its capital, Zagreb. Again, I felt like I had left the modern world. Though new cars and trucks passed me along the road, the wooded forests and the hawks flying above were persistent reminders that, despite this country’s history, the land beneath us had never changed. Driving into Zagreb, the old world was mashed right up against the new. Russian Orthodox church spires and leftover communist buildings mixed with the modernization of twenty-first-century Europe.

  I pulled into the town center, parked Kindness One legally for once, and in record-breaking time, found someone to be nice to me—apparently kindness happens quicker in Croatia. I even met a finalist from Croatia’s version of American Idol. Though she couldn’t offer me a place to stay, she gladly sang me a song to ease the rejection. Afterward, she told me, “There is hostel just down the street. Maybe they help.”

  I figured anyone who can get on Croatian Idol must know what they’re doing. I got back on Kindness One and located the hostel near the picturesque square that was the heart and soul of the city. Before I even made it to the front desk, though, I ran into a fellow traveler, Fraser, or, as I would soon be calling him, “The Scotsman.” The Scotsman was a slight man with cropped dirty-blond hair and an easy smile. I told of him of my journey.

  He offered to buy me a coffee at the hostel’s café, and as we sat and talked, I felt as though I were looking into a mirror. Fraser’s love of adventure reflected my own desire for the road and all its magic and madness.

  Fraser explained his plan to travel for the next four years by bicycle. “I just wanted to do something that I would look on for years to come and think, ‘What an amazing experience.’ And I’m just at the point in my life where if I don’t do it now, I probably never will.”

  “It’s funny, Fraser,” I looked into my coffee as I spoke, as though I might see my future in there. “I have this wonderful woman back home, in LA, and I left, and some days on the journey, I don’t know why I did, and then I have moments like this and I wonder whether I will ever be willing to give them up.”

  My new friend completely understood. As he explained, most of his friends and family were already married with children. “I’m not ready to settle down,” he conti
nued. “And I suppose I just realized that this is an opportunity I can’t afford not to take.”

  This man was speaking my language. The purest form of Scottish known to man! He knew what it was like to attend weddings, be the best man, hold your brother’s baby in your arms, and know that it just wasn’t your time yet. Know that it might never be your time, that finding a soul mate in a hostel in Zagreb, meeting musicians from Benin on the streets of Aix-en-Provence, driving through Nebraska and Slovenia, and crossing the Atlantic Ocean might be the most permanent things in the world. Life on the road provided its own home. But as I drank the rest of my coffee, I couldn’t help but wonder, at what price?

  Fraser explained, “I think that part of the problem is if you’re not passionate about something, there’s only so much you can give. I’m passionate about this, so . . .”

  His voice cracked, the emotion seeping through. I understood. It was the joy that comes when you finally stop living the life others have given you and you start living the one you always dreamed might be yours. The French philosopher Voltaire once said: “Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.”

  Fraser would be gone for four years, a far greater length of time than my own adventure, but he wasn’t running away. I knew that. He was committing instead to that great and open road of self-discovery. Sadly, so many of us live behind the mask of “Everything’s fine,” and we never get to ask the question, “What if?” What if I followed my dream? What if I learned to play the violin? What if I started rowing on the weekends? What if I traveled the world on a motorbike with only kindness to carry me? I knew Fraser would find that the road was not an easy one, but the one thing it did promise was the ability for us to accept our own fates. It showed us that we would never have to ask, “What if?”

  I drove out of Zagreb and headed toward Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was only a five-hour drive, but Kindness One was beginning to act up for the first time since that breakdown in Chicago—less than five thousand miles and yet so many memories ago. The bike would trick me into a false sense of security, moving along nicely, only to conk out in the middle of a cliffside road. Not terrifying at all, I tell you. The five-hour drive turned into a ten-hour one, and I still had seventy-five miles to go as the sun set across the Bosnian countryside. It took me a number of gas stations before I found someone willing to offer me shelter for the night, a young couple who kindly loaned me their couch and some much-needed rest.

  The next morning, I finally arrived in Sarajevo, which was described by one of the locals as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.” I soon understood why. Mosques, churches, and synagogues all live side by side, just as they have for centuries.

  It was in Sarajevo that I met a Bosnian named Edis. Though I had decided that most of my journey would be free of tourist attractions, choosing instead to get to know a city through its people rather than its museums and castles, Sarajevo’s rich history had always fascinated me. As in many of the cities I had already wandered, walking through Sarajevo’s cobbled streets connected me to a past that seemed to rise up from the boulevards, calling out from the stone walls and towering trees of eras gone by. History had come to life. Though Sarajevo will always be linked to the dreadful wars of the 1990s—especially the siege that strangled the city from 1992 to 1995—it is also the city where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated along with his wife in 1914, lighting the fuse of World War I. The city’s history runs through it like lightning, leaving the air taut as the most recent memories still try to settle.

  As I drove through the streets of Sarajevo, I realized that it was the first city I had been to that had seen a war during my lifetime. As I passed the infamous Holiday Inn hotel, which sits directly on the street known as “sniper alley,” I could still feel the fear that so many must have felt while crouching down in the guest rooms as shells slammed into the yellow facade of the hotel. I could sense the terror that the locals must have experienced walking down the main road, hearing the sound of sniper’s bullets whistling past their ears, or even worse, striking. And here I was, only twenty years later, driving down that same street on a yellow motorbike of kindness. And despite the permanence of things, time does indeed change us—sometimes for the worse, and yes, sometimes, if we allow it, for the better.

  I had heard of a local museum that told more of the story of the Bosnian War, but this was no ordinary museum. It actually used to be a house, the site of an underground tunnel that served a critical role during the siege of Sarajevo.

  And in that house was its former inhabitant Edis, a Bosnian not far from my own age, who explained how the eight-hundred-meter tunnel had been built to give the city’s inhabitants a lifeline during the siege, a lifeline during a time when humanity had turned against itself.

  “So who owns the house now?” I asked Edis, who had grown up in the war, even serving as a soldier for a time.

  “The government, actually. Although this was my family’s house before the war,” he explained. “We were here at that time, you know, when they came to build the tunnel. My father agreed to give the house and land and everything we had at that time for the army, for the tunnel.”

  It’s not every day you meet a hero. Edis’s family had risked their lives for their fellow neighbors, handing over everything they had to the army so that others might be able to get out of the city safely, and all the while, they had to pretend that they were living a normal life, in a normal house. They had to hold up the ultimate mask that everything was fine, even though they were playing a pivotal role in the middle of a major war. They had offered people a way out, but more than that, they showed them that the bonds of love and trust could not be destroyed by warfare. They were more permanent than anything else.

  “So how does it feel to know that your house and your family helped to save the city of Sarajevo?” I asked.

  “An incredible feeling,” Edis replied. I could feel his pride. As much as I always looked at home as something that held me back, I could see that for Edis, it was what held him together. I loved the road less traveled, and yet so much of this world demanded permanence, demanded commitment, demanded valor in order to keep safe the places we call home and the people we call family.

  We were standing in the tunnel itself, and as he looked into the darkness, where people had run quietly (and quickly) through the night, praying to make it out alive, Edis explained, “You know, I was also at that time defending the city. I was a member of the Bosnian army. I participated in this tunnel also. Here, we help three hundred thousand people to survive.”

  I could feel him looking at me in the dark, his eyes shining brightly as he said, “This is really a special thing.”

  For all my love of living life on the road, this man’s family had taken an immense risk to stay, to commit themselves to each other and to their people. I thought again of my grandfather, who had risked his life to defend his own home.

  My throat tightened as I realized out loud: “You are in very many ways responsible for saving this city.”

  Edis didn’t reply. He just nodded.

  Often it is so hard to accept gratitude, to honor ourselves for the good we do. But we must—we must celebrate what’s permanent. Because though sometimes we can be a destructive people, sometimes we can be heroes.

  Edis went back upstairs as I went for a walk in what remained of the passageway. I touched its cool, damp walls and felt my feet walking in the same footsteps of the hundreds of thousands who fled through it, praying that they might live to see the sun rise, that they might get to hold their wives once again or kiss the faces of their children, people for whom home wasn’t a choice, but a desperate and heartbroken dream.

  As I left Edis’s former home, I thought again about my grandfather in London, but also back to Taso’s story of 9/11 in New York. Wherever there is tragedy, there is also love. There are people coming together to save each other, to offer food and water, and
in the case of Edis’s family, to put their own lives at risk to protect what matters most.

  Though I knew that there was still much healing to be done in Sarajevo, as I left Edis and walked back to Kindness One through the safe and quiet streets, I saw a people reunited—Muslims and Christians sharing the city in peace. And underneath that history of war, of destruction, of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, was also a place of healing.

  * * *

  I left Sarajevo for the hilly and beautiful terrain of Montenegro, taking a small mountain road that had been suggested to me by a young couple in the capital. Controlled by the Slavs, the Romans, and ultimately, the Soviets, the land that is Montenegro has struggled for centuries to find itself. The more countries I visited, the more I began to view them as people. Some, like France, were confident in their identities. Others were still reeling from recent traumas, trying to figure out who they might be in times of peace.

  I rode through one of the many mountain passes that twist and turn through Montenegro only to realize I wasn’t going to make it much farther without gas. The bike started sputtering, and I switched it to reserve, barely making it to a mountain village. After meeting a number of townsfolk who didn’t speak English, I finally came across one who did. Sal had lived in New York many years before, until he ran into some problems with the chaps at immigration, who had politely urged him to return to his homeland.

  “You go to restaurant in town,” he offered, showing me on my map where I might find this local establishment, “and talk to my nephew. Bekim. He maybe help you.”

  I arrived at the small café, where, once again, no one spoke English. But I was able to figure out one thing: Bekim was not there.

  I sat down outside and began preparing to spend the night in Kindness One. I could feel a chill entering the air and already knew my night would not be as pleasant as the one in Lake Como. Not that my night in Lake Como had been particularly pleasant.