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‘I’ve seen the power of kindness’: Ruby Wax explains how she found hope in troubled times

Ruby Wax  - Andrew Crowley
Ruby Wax - Andrew Crowley

With everything 2020 has thrown at us, it can be hard not to feel like the world is crumbling around us. But according to the comedian, author and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax, this is exactly the moment that we need to look for “green shoots of hope”.

“It’s about where you put your attention,” she tells me on the phone, her gravelly Midwest American accent sounding tired and less buoyant than I’m used to hearing on television. “Even though life is hard, if you try to look at a kindness someone did, or if you take part in it, for example helping out a soup kitchen or changing the way your business works to be more empathetic, then you can see rays of sunlight underneath the storm. But you’ve got to look for it.”

Which is what she did for her new book, And Now For the Good News… For three years, she researched organisations, businesses, and educational establishments that worked in different, kinder ways or aimed to produce ripples of good on the world, such as the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, where, among other perks, employees can bring their children to the on-site crèche.

“The company is filled with the sound of children’s laughter,” says Wax, who visited its headquarters in California. “It’s infectious. The whole way of working is geared towards making the employees feel good – and as a result they work so hard. I’d work there tomorrow.” And that kindness pays off: according to Wax, Patagonia’s sales have quadrupled over the past decade.

Patagonia outdoor fashion - John Lawrence
Patagonia outdoor fashion - John Lawrence

The book was written before coronavirus appeared on our horizon, but it feels timely, none the less. Fear, she says in the book, can be contagious, as Donald Trump – a name Wax tries not to utter – is currently proving. But so can hope and compassion, if only we look for it, engage with it and pass it on. “I don’t think there is a better time to talk about this,” she says.

Not that she advocates plastering a smile on our faces and trying to pretend that everything is OK. “That kind of positive thinking, for those of us who have a dark side, makes us feel even lower self-esteem; we don’t live like that,” Wax says. Studies including a 2011 one into so-called “emotional labour” back her up: those who don’t experience the genuine emotion they display outwardly get no beneficial effect – in fact, they can feel worse. Instead, it’s partly about avoiding the negative news cycle – tricky as that may be at the moment with fears of a second wave, effects of the recession and riots in the Unites States – and zoning in on what is working.

So, as well as travelling to Patagonia’s offices, Wax hopped on planes to China and Finland to see examples of progressive schooling around the world. Her own school experience in the US was average: she achieved middling grades and got used to her parents telling her she was “a loser”. “[My school] didn’t turn my little light on; that stayed off for a long time. But you can get smart later in life, it’s not something you only achieve as a kid.”

Wax herself later gained a postgraduate certificate in psychotherapy and counselling at Regent’s University in 2006 and also studied a degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Kellogg College, Oxford. As well as mental health campaigning, for which she was awarded an OBE, part of her work now includes teaching mindfulness to businesses and organisations, including MI5, Facebook, Google and Apple.

She again saw the negative effects of schooling when her own three children – now in their 20s – were privately educated in the UK. “Schools dampen out the creative in kids,” she says. “They all learn in different ways, but that’s not accommodated for in most schools. One of my kids was fine because he has a mathematical brain, but one of them could have been crushed. I wouldn’t say that everyone is particularly emotionally stable from going to school.” She likens mainstream schooling techniques to “fast-food education; it’s depleting these kids’ brains and making them burn out. You can’t produce cookie-cutter kids; you have to work on techniques to improve their resilience.”

In Finland, however, as well as at the Shanghai branch of Wellington College UK and two progressive schools in Britain, she saw educators “teaching empathy and kindness, and the children get better grades because of it.” Not that parents need to move their children to these select establishments to reap the benefits. “There are lots of these things, like teaching mindfulness, that you can do at home. This book isn’t just about the extreme examples, it’s about what steps you can take now.”

Ruby Wax And Now For The Good News... - Andrew Crowley
Ruby Wax And Now For The Good News... - Andrew Crowley

Wax admits that lockdown was “Kafkaesque at the beginning.” But it seems that she found a way to not only cope, but thrive. Every night she logged on to chat to others at the Frazzled Café, a charity she set up in 2017 that offers free peer support sessions in small groups – although over lockdown it moved to Zoom sessions. “There was so much compassion on that screen every night with everyone looking directly at everyone with no other distractions. That got me through.”

Ever since growing up an only child in what she’s previously described as an emotionally abusive family, she has always craved her own community. “My family were defective,” she says bluntly. “I always wanted to find my people.” She describes watching large families from her window as a little girl, envying them. But despite her gregarious public image, long ago she realised she hated cocktail parties, where you “turn yourself inside out, to make yourself special for someone you don’t even care about.”

Instead, as she writes in the book about the benefits of community, she focuses on small groups and interactions, which has even included inviting strangers to live with her and setting up her Frazzled community. “I have more in common with these people than some of my friends,” she says quietly.

Perhaps even her family. While she spent some of lockdown with her husband, the television producer Ed Bye, and one of her daughters at her home in London, the rest of it she spent alone at her home in a small village in Hertfordshire, where she goes to write. Lockdown in many ways, seemed to grow to suit her. “Now I’m addicted to isolation,” she says. She intends to “go off-grid in California and write about that experience for my next book.”

Wax writes that she’s part of the “me” generation that “are so self-obsessed and unaware, we sucked the planet dry.” She was part of the protests of the 1960s, marching against the Vietnam War and even getting arrested, and so sees parallels with today’s young people who join Extinction Rebellion (as she also did for research purposes) and Black Lives Matter. But in general she doesn’t hold out much hope for others her own age. “I don’t really think people become more aware when they grow up, unless they really want to – so many people spend a lifetime justifying their greed.”

This book isn’t an attempt to persuade those people, but rather to document her own learnings and perhaps inspire the rest of us to take heart from the (often) younger generation she cites as examples of her green shoots of hope. “I never think, ‘let’s change the world’, I only think you can change yourself,” she says. “I sound like a do-gooder; I’m not,” she says. “I just know how good it feels.”

And Now for the Good News… To the Future with Love by Ruby Wax (Penguin, £14.99) is out on Sept 17

What small acts of kindness have given you hope during these troubled times? Tell us in the comments section below