We Are Each on Our Own Kindness Path
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness. Seneca
We are each living with the gifts and challenges of our life journey – perhaps similar, but different from those of any other person.
Once we have chosen to live with kindness, we are on a unique kindness path. What is right for one person may not be the right path for someone else.
There is no hierarchy of kindness, with some kind acts being more important than others. Every act of kindness adds a bit of love to our world, often changing someone’s day at just the right time for them. Often, we do not know the impact of our kind word or action. A warm smile and pleasant greeting in someone’s life at that moment might have a bigger impact than an elaborate plan to cheer someone up when they’re down.
This not-knowing provides the foundation of our kindness practice. I am free to just show up with a genuine desire to connect, without analyzing someone else’s situation and deciding if they even deserve my kindness.
For many people, kindness is a transaction. I will be kind to you if you are nice to me, or if I see you being kind to someone else. The other side of that coin is that I will withhold my kindness if you are rude to me or to someone else. I will judge you as unworthy of my kindness.
When that happens, I have moved from not-knowing to judgment, an easy step, but one that takes me out of my heart and leaves me off my chosen path. At that time, I give you the power to decide how I show up in this situation. Without knowing it, you are controlling my behavior.
Kindness is an expression of love. Withholding kindness happens when we have abandoned our heart and moved to our head, which is often full of judgments.
How do we avoid that easy step?
Our actions are an expression of who we are. Once we decide to be kind – not just to act kind sometimes, but to be kindness in the world - our actions follow that directive. Then, we do not respond in kind to someone else’s behavior but with kindness, as an expression of who we are.
It takes practice. Most of us find it easy to fall back into judgment.
This is a good place to talk about our kindness journey. Always remember that it is a journey, a process. Like anything else in life, it offers us opportunities to grow as we go, to learn from the times when we fall short of our intended behavior. Sometimes, I still fall back into old patterns of reaction when I genuinely want to be kind. Some people still push my old judgment buttons.
Part of my journey has been learning to be kind to myself and to understand that the transition to being kind is a process. Letting go of the old way of being in the world takes time. The more we practice, the better we get at it.
So, be gentle with yourself. Welcome the times when you step off the path. Let them help you to understand yourself. Then return to the commitment you have made to yourself to be kind as you show up in our messy, challenging world again.
Image by Dennis P from Pixabay
