Kindness

My English teacher always castigated us if we ever used the word ‘nice’, in our essays. She said it was insipid, weak, and benign. She said that we hadn’t thought hard enough to find a better word. It was laziness. I always had the same conditioned response to the word ‘kind’. It was good to be nice and kind, but who wants that on their epitaph?... the narrative went.
 
Put that conditioning about the word ‘kind’, against a true story I heard this week. A lady worked the 4am shift in an all-night diner in the American Midwest. One night, at the start of her stint, a 12-year-old boy comes in looking lost and bereft and sits down at Table 4 and studies the menu. He clearly isn’t there to buy anything. He needs to get warm. The lady, seeing this, gets him some toast and eggs and a hot drink. When the food arrives, he looks at her and says he has no money. She says he just needs to eat. He comes in a few days later. She does the same. He comes in regularly. She does the same. One day he stops coming in. There is more to what happens, but her colleagues also start leaving a hot plate of food on Table 4 for whoever might need it that particular night. Over time, other all-night diners in the district hear of this and they also start the same practice. Two years later the boy comes in, sits down at Table 4 and puts $2 on the table and says to the waitress that he would like her to pay it forwards. Kindness begets kindness in unexpected directions.
 
Imagine arriving at day 1 of Primary School and your teaching saying, “today your life-journey starts in a whole new way. Here is what you need to know, every day, for the rest of your life. The significance of your life will be measured by the difference that you make in the lives of others. So, ask yourself that question at the end of each day.”
That saying actually came from the mouth of Nelson Mandela. He also said, “the smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention”. One of the greatest elders of our lifetime says that kindness is the mark of greatness.
 
The world is full of people shouting loudly, angrily, violently, defending and attacking. We experience being over-powered by so much, in so many areas of our lives, and the great temptation is to hide in defence, or attack. Even in the smallest ways.

In September this year, while on retreat, I had an epiphany. It was simply this.
Kindness is everything. Just work that out into every part of your life. That's your calling.
 
What does kindness do?
 
Kindness opens us up, where we are defended against receiving love and affirmation and intimacy. Kindness makes our reactions of positioning, posturing, ego-ing, and tribal-ing, redundant. It softens the edges of our responses. It touches us below the belt of our manufactured self-image and reaches the underbelly of our unique calling in life to be who we can be, as well as to do what we can do.
 
Kindness makes friends out of strangers. A simple act of helping some mother with her pram in the subway, turns a stranger into a warm partner in that moment. Kate Adie captured it beautifully in her book of reflections in the world's war zones. What did she learn? Not the power of leadership, the awesomeness of war, but the kindness of strangers[1].
 
Kindness changes mindsets. Mindsets control our life story. They keep us where we are. Nothing changes in our lives without mindset change. So, what is the precursor to mindset change? Kindness. This is ancient wisdom. Why? Because kindness shows us what is possible, rather than what is predictable.
 
Kindness is better than life itself. That is what the wisdom literature has said for a few thousand years. Committed love, expressed in kindness, is the very essence of the breath we breath, the divine, the Other, Presence…God (God is just the shortest word in the English language to sum up this transcendent reality)
 
I don’t know how kind I am. I’m sure it’s relative. I’m learning. Slowly. I live with someone who is exemplary in kindness and so it’s not hard not to feel on some days that I’m not so good at it.
But I can see that it is everything.
I can see I need to work at it every day.
 
And I will.