I have been thinking about kindness lately. Kindness is so very important to our lives, and we don’t hear about it very much. Everyone wants to be fearless, tough, fierce, a go-getter, a winner; they want to live strong and do whatever it takes, etc. etc.
Who among us wants to be kind? And I am not talking about stamping out hunger, or changing the world, or saving the environment. I am talking about being kind – to ourselves, to other people and also to animals.
Kindness changes everything. In order to be kind, we must sometimes acknowledge our frailty, our humanity, our weakness. In order to be kind, we must stop fighting and struggling. We must be willing to do something small, something almost inconsequential for someone else, and/or for ourselves. For example, it would be kind to bring your spouse a cup of coffee or a drink. So small, but we have to stop being angry long enough to do that one small thing. It would be kind to help an older person who is struggling at the grocery store to load up their groceries, or to hand them something from the top or bottom shelf. It would be kind to speak softly to our children, to let them have time to themselves to just think and process through the day. It would be kind to smile at someone who may feel disenfranchised – perhaps a person we would otherwise ignore, or even go out of our way to avoid acknowledging entirely. Sometimes, it might be kind to keep our opinions to ourselves. It would be kind to quietly accept someone else’s folly.
We are not condoning bad behavior. We are just giving a person space. We are allowing them to not be perfect for awhile.
Does the thought of kindness make you want to weep? It does me too. So, just for a little while, let us stop being so very successful, so very productive, so very capable and so very fierce. Let us be kind.