Helping to make life more bearable

Kurt Vonnegut said, “Go into the arts. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.”
That seems an almost defeatist way of looking at life but it’s true. Creativity is known to soothe the soul; to be in the tool box for rehabilitation.
Yet the first programs we cut from education, when the money gets tight, are the arts programs. Rather, we tend to educate our children to become consumers, as if that is the only way to pursue a meaningful successful life.
And while we do so, we educate the creativity right out of them.
Vonnegut was a prolific American writer who died in 2007 at the age of 84. He was described as a “morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived.” A good fit if you’ve read any of his work (I tend to think of him as a writer who said it like it was).
I was driving home from Cape Breton last week. My heart is heavy this time of year; the ache inside me palpable as I mark the 42nd year I will live without my father—his death on the Saturday morning of Thanksgiving weekend (Oct. 12 to be precise), a statistic I’ve undoubtedly written about in excess and I apologize to you for that.
While I drive, I think and mentally compile a list of all the moments I am thankful for during the brief time my father and I shared our lives; our love of farming deeply entrenched in our cells. And I have learned to replace the longing and the ache with joyful memories of him.
While I drove and was remembering and compiling my list for Year 42, I thought of tunes my father played on the piano, created in the moment, possibly just a sequence of notes. But it came from him, not from a page of music.
His eyes closed and his chin fell toward his chest, and he played. I think life was heavy for him; the worries piling up perhaps.
I guess Mr. Vonnegut was right because the music seemed to calm my father. I remember sitting next to him on the piano bench and offering him my brown and yellow teddy bear, formally known as “Ted,” hoping it would comfort him.
He smiled and gathered “Ted” and me on to his knee. The gesture worked.
While I was driving, I also listened to Rami Adham. He was a guest on CBC Radio speaking about the fact he knows children need something soft and cuddly for comfort.
For four years this man has smuggled toys into war-torn Syria, to his hometown of Aleppo, to comfort children with his offerings of toys so that some element of a childhood can be restored to their lives—lives that are in daily peril.
Rami lives in Finland now and has since 1989, the father of six. He credits his three-year-old daughter with the idea of sharing toys.
He has made 28 trips into Syria to bring 20,000 toys to children in Aleppo and surrounding refugee camps. These children, the recipients of Rami’s toys, have something to hug, something to cuddle with, as they try to make “life more bearable.”
Vonnegut was right; the arts surely help. It is no understatement to say that some of the finest creativity comes from the areas of most lacking in this country and undoubtedly around the world.
But I think it’s good to remember we also can find our humanity in something as simple as a teddy bear.
wendistewart@live.ca