A Guide to Kindness

Kindness: the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. (Kindness Definition - Google Search, n.d.) to ourselves, people around us, our planet and perhaps our neighbouring universes. Kindness as a phenomenon occurs for many different reasons in many different ways. In this essay, I would like to explore first the many different ways it occurs, why I think people are kind, how kindness is second nature to us and then about what I think is important when it comes down to deciding about being kind. 

“As we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish,” (George Saunders, n.d.) as advice to a graduating class. According to Saunders, we all have a luminous soul, kindness is natural to us, and the sooner we learn to be kinder the better it is. Initiatives like the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation advocate the view that practising kindness is scientifically good for us and our health; they say it increases love hormones, energy and happiness. (Make Kindness The Norm, n.d.)They are gaining good ground I would say.  “Kind is the new cool” for the current generation of youth. “What my generation struggled so hard to achieve imperfectly is becoming the new normal.” (Eisensitne, n.d.) He refers to how during his time, kids in schools were mean and unkind to each other and the nice kids always had it extremely difficult. 

One could perhaps question where different acts of kindness stem from and find many different reasons for it. The kind of kindness we see the most is the one that is documented, the stuff we watch on youtube and the news. I find a lot of it to be exhibitionist. More often than not the intention behind kindness is an act of ego satisfaction; it could because the acts come out of guilt, wanting to seem/feel good, account for charity/social responsibility and/or as a marketing strategy. Belief systems that have been handed down from previous generations also talk a great deal about kindness. In my opinion, these belief systems and traditions are the most effective and widespread ways of getting people to be kinder. Some are God-fearing and some are consequence-fearing or both. The bible says “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”(Galatians 5:13). People do it because their god asks them to do so. The understanding of “what goes around comes around” the cyclic nature of our deeds exists in many different religions. It’s popularly termed as karma and lot people understand it in many different ways and act kindly, accordingly. 

I would say most of these actions largely benefit people but whether it is reaching the right people respectfully, and on time is questionable. We could go a step further and ask if our reasons are correct or moral. Another reason why people are kind is one could say is out of love. (“Love and Other Injustices,” 2016) Naisargi N. Dave, in her paper, explores where animal activists a.k.a. animal lovers operate from: a place of love for the animals. She observed that sometimes that love can turn into a sort of madness where it reaches a point to which one fails to take care of themselves in the process of being kind to animals. “Love is an injustice because when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save.” She says Indifference alone is injustice and distinction is an injustice. Love for sameness is wrong (xenophobia) and so is a love for difference (philoxenia). Instead, she suggests “indifference to difference” as an ethic or a way of being. 

Kindness has to flow naturally from within us, it has to feel like the right thing to do. We all are capable of feeling empathy, capable of knowing when someone we are around is not okay. Some people are certainly better than others due to various reasons. But we all are, I know this in my bones. When we feel that someone around us is not okay, the next thing we ought to do is find out if there is something we can do for them. If for some reason we fail to recognise that the other person is not okay then we may not be okay. We need to be kinder to ourselves first. And If we don't feel like being kind to ourselves, it is a bigger problem and we may need help. When someone is acting unkind, they/we are simply not in touch with our true nature/self. Healing oursurselves and being our true selves will result in kindness and kindness will help with more healing. Everything is interconnected and we have the capacity to feel, be kind to and heal our planet as well. I want to say this is what I believe in, but it does not just believe it is a kind of truth or rather it has been my experience as an energy healing practitioner. 

While all of us keep working on Dave’s suggestion and healing ourselves, this is what I think are the 4  key things one has to do while practising kindness: 1 knowing how to be kind to oneself. If we do this being kind to others will happen naturally. 2 Being able to ask for kindness when we need it. 3 Always keep the question of ‘why?’ alive. And 4 Acknowledge our true experience. 

Bibliography 

Eisensitne, C. (n.d.). Kind is the new cool.

George Saunders: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” (n.d.). Ladders | Business News & Career Advice. Retrieved August 13, 2020, from https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/george-saunders-to-syracuses-cl...

Love and Other Injustices: On Indifference to Difference. (2016, January 29). [Text]. Franklin Humanities Institute. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/love-and-other-injustices/

Make Kindness The Norm. (n.d.). Random Acts of Kindness. Retrieved August 13, 2020, from https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/the-science-of-kindness