A Year Of Kindness (XXXVIII): Never Regret Choosing Kindness

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Arguably are there times that I have "regretted" choosing kindness?  If I am honest, at some level I am sure there are.

But if I look into that a little more, I find something else at play.  It is not regret at having done the act of kindness but the regret of how little it may be noticed or appreciated.

But that really becomes my problem, not the other person's.  Yes, I may have been taken advantage of or misunderstood or ignored.  But ultimately, kindness is more about myself and not their reaction.

It is a far better thing to be able to look back and - no matter what the outcome - realize that I did the right thing, the better thing, the kind thing.  Part of it is a recognition that life goes on beyond this mortal plane and every deed - good or evil - comes along with us to the Great Day of Judgement.

But part of it as well is I just feel better afterwards.  Because I did the kind and correct thing.

Never regret choosing kindness.

A Year Of Kindness (XXXVII): Someone

 

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Someone will need my kindness today.

It will very probably be someone that I have no idea needs it. 

It will likely be in a way that I cannot know would be the most helpful for them at that moment.  

It could be something as simple as a smile or an opened door.  It could be something more:  a conversation I did not intend to have but did, a deed I did not think I would do but it turned out to be only a  little effort, a laugh that I did not intend to create, an accidentally encouraging word I gave without realizing it.

But someone will need my kindness today, someone who will not tell me that they do.

Someone will need it every day.  

A Year Of Kindness (XXXVI): Lending Our Strength

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You may remember that earlier in this series, we discussed the matter of kindness as loaning our strength to another.  Today's quote focuses on the same idea but from a different angle: not making the people to whom we are lending our strength through kindness feel the worse for needing it.

This concept should not really be difficult for me to consider.  If I think about all the times growing up I "helped" an adult with a project or "bought" a gift for my family, it is clear that it was not "me" doing it, it was the adult in the situation.  Yet never once in all my days can I think someone told me "You are not really doing that" or "You are not really buying that".

An element of kindness - perhaps more implicit than I think - is how we make the other person feel when they are receiving it.

We are all familiar with the bad sort of kindness, I should imagine:  the condescension that comes when someone makes a production out of doing a kind deed and the almost inevitable feeling of being the object of that condescension.  We feel small, worthless, perhaps even ashamed for the need.  

Kindness - at least as I see it - is a dance between doing the kind deed and never having the other person feel as if the deed (or thought or word or whatever) is any sort of an inconvenience or a big ask.  I place great value in the fact that we should always allow people their dignity - their honour - no matter what the situation.

Sometimes we find out it is a big ask after the fact of course:  the hours our parents worked so that we could do a thing, the sacrifice of someone offering to do something for us that they sincerely dislike, the person who did not have the time to attend to our issue but did anyway.

In a sense, is this not like Christ?

Yes, I know - there is a great division between us and the Godhead.  But in reading the Gospels, one constantly finds Christ offering kindnesses - healing, food, counsel, personnel management for his rather cranky group of disciples - and yet He never rejects those who sincerely came asking, or those to whom He freely offered His kindness.  We read occasionally of His struggles and His agony, but at the time this was often concealed from the disciples:  the 40 Days of Temptation, the hours spent praying at night alone, His exhaustion from the crowds.  Only at the end of His Life - at the Last Supper, at the Garden of Gethsemane - does He seem to hint to them in real time of what this has - and will - cost Him.

We, as Christians, should not do any less.

Let us offer kindness, but do it in such a way that its receivers feel anything but part of the process and never feel shame for asking for it or receiving it.

A Year Of Kindness (XXXV): The Secretly Kind

 

One of the most memorable fictional characters I can think of from high school is Boo Radley in Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird.  Radley is a character most do not know about: seldom seen, shy and awkward, he is a silent presence looms as a sort of dark image throughout most of the bok.  By the end of the story, we find out that Radley was also a purveyor of small gifts and ultimately, the saver of a life. 

How often I mistake kindness as something that only comes from a certain kind of people, or do not expect it from certain people.

Kindness knows no personality borders.  There is no "base case" for whether someone can or cannot practice kindness based on their outward demeanor or personality.

Sometimes they simply struggle to relate to people.  Sometimes they can generally interact only one way most of the time.  Everyone is indeed fighting battle, and many times we know nothing about it.

So I have tried to rectify this in myself.  I have tried to remain neutral in terms of "if someone is capable of kindness" based on how they generally act.

Funny story that goes along with that:  people have surprised with their kindness in ways that I never might have imagined based on their general actions and personality.

Sometimes, we are our own worst enemy to people practicing kindness to others.

A Year Of Kindness (XXXIV): Keep Choosing Kindness

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Choosing kindness is a harder road than most think.

To choose kindness is to know that quite often, the actions will not be noticed.  People may see the results of such actions, but they may not connect it to something that someone did to make that possible.

Sometimes your actions will be misinterpreted.  Sometimes they will be outright questioned or mocked:  "Why", the question will come, "would you do that for that person?"

I try to not pay attention to all of that - because I know in my own life I can see the footprints of kindness in my own life, sometimes decades after the actions were taken.

Keep on keeping on. Keep on being kind.

A Year Of Kindness (XXXIII): Minor Chord

 

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"The world is not kind so I will be" is thought we have visited a great deal over the course of the year; nothing inherently novel in that.  What struck me about this picture is the juxtaposition of the two characters:  often such pictures or thoughts come with genuinely delightful bucolic scenes or lovely flowers.  They do not often come with a much darker theme.

But should I be surprised at this?  I freely admit that I am in many ways a sort of bumbling bucolic fool, wandering through life ignorant (or ignorant by choice) of some of the realities of life (which I grant are out there).  But there is kindness to be found in those places too, kindnesses that are invisible to me in what is a different point of the world.

Regardless of bucolic scenes or dark realities, the world can still be unkind.  All the more reason - in whatever circumstances - to practice kindness as often as we can.

A Year Of Kindness (XXXII): Worthy

 

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There is nothing more crippling to a person that to tell them that they are not worthy and are not loved.

You do not really appreciate the depth of the issue until it has happened to you.  And likely, it has happened to all of us at some time:  a parent, a spouse, a friend, a coach, a manager, a relative, a coworker.  It can come from anywhere. 

But its impacts can last for a lifetime.

To believe that one is not worthy and not loved is to carry a burden that no human was designed to carry.

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To believe one is not worthy and not loved can manifest itself in one of two behaviours.

In one behaviour, we are always searching to make ourselves worthy and loveable.  We will go to any length, do almost anything - sometimes very foolish or even dangerous things - to prove that what we were told about ourselves was not true.

In the other behaviour, we become hardened.  We do not care if we are worthy or loved - and too often, we come to treat others as not worthy or not loveable.  After all - if I am not, I need not treat other people as they are worthy or loveable either.

Instead of being confident and coming from a place of love and strength, we come from a place of desperation or anger that tinges everything we do.

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When we are kind to another - when we offer them worth and love simply by treating them kindly, we strike back at a world that does not share such a message.

Francis Schaeffer writes often about the importance of treating people - all people - as if they matter to us, because in point of fact that matter to God.  The Bible says they do, of course - after all, God sent His Son to die for all, that all might be saved.  But often we can fall short of this:  we treat some people as they matter, just as the world does.

We should treat people as if they are worthy and loveable, just as God treated us in the same way.  And that can start by simply being kind.

A Year Of Kindness (XXXI): Reminding People They Matter

 

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Some of greatest kindnesses offered to me were offered by people that did not have time to spend with me but spent it with me anyway.  And some of the greatest discomforts I have had are by people who clearly indicated that they did not want to spend time with me but were doing it in a begrudging fashion.

Even the very act of stopping, listening fully, and engaging - even when we do not feel like we have the time - can have untold benefits in the lives of others.  We are showing them that are important - maybe more important than they feel they are.

We can practice kindness in the most seemingly insignificant moments - or at least, seemingly insignificant to us.

A Year Of Kindness (XXX): A Reason To Be Kind

 "If you look at the world, it's very easy to get dejected.  The situation you find yourself in, often you hope no one finds themselves in.  But this is all the more reason to be kind and caring.  If you spot someone in a spot of bother, and you have the ability to do something about it, do it.  Pay it forward.  Not just for your own sake, but as a matter of common decency from someone who knows how tough it can be.

There's nothing stopping you from being kind."

- Tim Bunting, The Kiwi Yamabushi (Source)

Tim Bunting  (The Kiwi Yamabushi) is a New Zealander who lives in Northern Japan. He is a practitioner of Shugendo, a native religion of Japan.  Its practitioners are known as yamabushi (literally "mountain warrior").  His website (over at the right) explains the concepts far better than I can.  I will also note for the record that he is a stand up fellow; I've spoken with him a couple of times.

His meditation on kindness is one that made me think.

Each of us, somewhere in our lives, has a tale of woe or two beneath our belts.  We have been betrayed, abandoned, treated poorly, accused without cause, rejected.  We know that that feeling is like, the days or weeks or years of depression and despair and anger.

We know, as the saying goes, what it is actually all about.

But that knowledge, suggests Bunting, is precisely the sort of thing that should urge us on to more acts of kindness.  We know.  We have been there.  We remember.  And - assuming that we have some level of human decency about us - we would not willingly wish that on others. 

There is often not a lot we can do in such situations, but there is one thing we can always do:  Be kind.  Be caring.

Because we know.  We remember.  And while maybe we cannot change what a person is facing in that moment, we can make the moment lighter for them - perhaps, we realize as someone did for us in our own similar states.  

It costs us nothing to help pick up a burden for even a moment.  But such kindness can mean the world to another.

A Year Of Kindness (XXIX): Stay Humble, Stay Kind

 

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One of the things that I am reminded of is that, like many personality traits, kindness (and humility) are something that I need to continually practice.  It is not, in that sense, a "one and done" kind of thing.

In some cases I can predict when my kindness will be at a low ebb:  Early morning, for example.  After a contentious meeting.  The moment on Tuesdays when I realize it is not Wednesday and the week seems to suddenly get longer.  These moments conspire to reduce the things I should be - kind, humble, generous, loving - to as small a trait as possible.

But it is especially in those moments that I need to practice them all the more.

  

The longer I live (and the longer I write these kinds of series), the more I become convinced that things like kindness and humility are important.  Not just because of the practice themselves, but the model that they provide.

I do not feel it is beyond the pale to say that if anything, our society has become even more "me-centric" than ever.  It does not help that as a consumer society, the market is set up to meet our needs and desires; many people have extended that same belief to almost everything around them.  "We" are the most important thing going on in our minds.

Which is why good models matter all the more.  Because people need to see that good people still exist and can practice character traits which seem not to benefit themselves directly at all, but benefit the world greatly.

So stay kind.  Stay humble.  The world indeed needs such reminders.

A Year Of Kindness (XXVIII): Be A Memory Of Kindness

 

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Nine months into my first industry job, I evacuated the entire second floor of a building.

It was an innocent enough thing:  removing a 4 L bottle of nitric acid from the acid storage cabinet, it hit the floor at just the right angle to crack it.  The acid began to leak out. I was not sure what to do, so I looked at it, dithered a bit, then went and found my supervisor.  Within 10 minutes the lab was shut as the acid outgassed and the second floor evacuated. All on the day of the company Christmas party, where I when scheduled to be Santa's stand-in but instead got my fingers taped up for (very) minor acid discoloration and sent home. 

Over the weekend, the rest of the team came in and completely wiped down the lab and everything in it.  No-one asked me to come.  No-one said a word about it afterwards.  It was just part of what people did.

I have memories like this scattered across my life and memory:  The Director and Uisdean Ruadh who looked after me at my worst, friends who guided me when I was being an idiot, a young tow truck driver who offered me half his sandwich when I was cold and miserable looking after I hit a curb and bent my rim the day before I was to leave for Japan, my coworkers after my being laid off.

A thousand stars, lit in the darkness of despair.

I have lost track of many of those people.  I doubt some of them remember the acts they did at the time.  But those acts keeping me thinking of them at odd moments and in the moments when I castigate myself for mistakes.  

It costs nothing to be kind.  But the act and the memory will live on long, long after events and perhaps even the acquaintance.

Be someone's inspiring memory.  Be kind.

A Year Of Kindness (XXVII): Loaning Our Strength

 

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One of the interesting things in doing a series like this is the very different thoughts that present themselves, ways of looking at things like humility or kindness in different ways.  Today's thought - Kindness as loaning someone our strength - is one of those items.

If I think about it initially, that seems counterintuitive to me.  When I am kind, it is myself that is taking the action.  It is not a loan as I would typically think about it, a temporary giving of something that I possess.

But if I think about it a little more, I realize my understanding is shallow.

Some of the times people have extended their kindness to me were times when I was truly in a spot of weakness - depressed, feeling lost, often reeling from the results of my own sin or thoughtlessness.  In those moments, the kindness of others never once reminded me of my current condition or how I had gotten there. It gave me the strength to get through the moment.

Sometimes that loaning of strength through kindness was for a moment.  Sometimes, as it turns out, it was for years. But in my case, the people that were kind, that lent me their strength, were never stingy about it.

We are all stronger than we think we are - and having that strength, we can afford to lend it to those in need of a little kindness to help them be strong in their own times of need.

I can show my strength.  I can be kind.

A Year Of Kindness (XXVI): We Don't Have To Agree...

 

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When I was younger, I was not very good at being kind to people with whom I did not agree.

Part of the problem was likely the fact that I suffered from a planet-sized ego (not unusual for young men) and was relatively certain that I had the right of things.  When disagreements came, it was as much of a personal attack as it was a discussion of issues.

Part of the problem as well was the fact that, well, the people that disagreed with me were not always kind either (possibly they saw the world in that sense exactly as I saw it).  The behaviour ranged the gamut from politely sniffing in conversation to exchanges to the banishment from their circle of contact. Which, of course, continued to justify my own behaviour.

And then one day I realized that kindness exercised by me had little if anything to do with how it was extended to me.  It had a great deal, however, to do with how I saw kindness.

It strikes me that sometimes I felt like kindness was a gift that I extended to some but not to others, something that I had the right to dispense as I saw fit.  It was in some ways similar to purchasing a round of drinks at the coffee bar: one looks at how many are there and who is there and then decides if one is really feeling that generous.

But kindness - although arguably being seen as a gift - is not something that I should dole out based on the condition of a person or, indeed if I agree with them.  Kindness is something that I should - and can - extend, perhaps in spite of what they - or I - believe.

"But they are not kind to you."  They were not kind to my Master either, yet He was kind back.

"They see kindness as weakness."  Possibly.  But if I allow kindness to become weakness, that is really on me then, not on them.

"Your kindness does not matter."  Not necessarily in the way one might think.  Yes, it might not have an immediate impact (although it might).  But the spectacle of the kind, the good, the beautiful, facing off with that which would seek to degrade it or silence it can be quite striking (and telling). And one never knows what impact that kindness might have years from now.

I cannot change circumstances.  I cannot change others.  I can only manage myself.  And I can choose to be kind, no matter whether or not I agree with anyone.

After all, the kind are remembered kindly.

A Year Of Kindness (XXV): Gentle And Lowly In Heart

 "Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from Me:  for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." - Matthew 11: 28-30

This set of verses are probably some of the best known and most quoted in the New Testament.  They speak to what it is like to have Christ as our Master.  The usual thing that is pointed to (I suspect) is the contrast between what we would expect from God and what He is actually like. 

But this being a series about kindness, we are looking at something a little different today.

My focus is on that part of the reading that says...."learn from Me:  for I am gentle and lowly in heart..."

The first aspect - one I have not really ever thought about until reading the verse for this posting - is the idea of "learn from Me".  Learning is not something I typically think of in my relationship with Christ.  Obedience, yes.  Confession, yes.  But learning in the sense that we learn from a teacher or mentor?  I have not ever thought of it this way.  It almost seems presumptuous, this "learning from God".

And what are we to learn?  "Gentleness and lowliness of heart".

If you are thinking that gentleness and lowliness of heart are aspects of kindness, you would not be wrong.

Christ was kind - infinitely kind to those around Him (with the exception of the presumptuous of heart and mis-quoters of Scripture, of course).  "A bruised reed He will not break", spoken of in the prophet Isaiah, aptly describes His relationship with both those seeking God as well as sinners who knew they were sinners. He practiced kindness in a way that might have struck folks as revolutionary: the association of religious teachers with "kind" does not come across any more frequently in Scripture then than it does in modern life.

Learn, says Christ, from me.

Are we gentle and lowly of heart (humility is not a bad synonym here) when we deal with others?  "Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others" says Paul in Philippians 2.  Or do we practice the "kindness" of the world, a self-interested set of actions that somehow always manage to set us up for success first and foremost or leave others feeling less heard and attended to and more used?

To be gentle and lowly of heart is a world that values this more in theory than in practice is, frankly, hard.  You will get ignored.  You will get over-run.  You will get stepped on.  And yet...

You will also make a difference in someone's life.  You may be the one good thing that happens to that person that day.  You, in the practice of lowliness and gentleness of heart, may give someone the one glimpse of Christ they may see in a day, a week, a month, or even a year.

Learn, says Christ, from me.  And then go do what I did and still do, practicing gentleness and lowliness of heart.  

Go, and practice kindness.

A Year Of Kindness (XXIV): Be The Thread

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One of the interesting things about participating in any sort of human association - work, religious group, volunteer, hobby - is that we are very often glazed vessels as we interact.

By "glazed vessels" I mean to say that we often present a hard shell of an image to the outer world and those we interact with.  Part of that is undoubtedly self-protection of course; there is nothing worse than exposing one's inner core and having it savaged or mocked.  But the other is a conscious choice:  it is not something we do.  There is a vague suggestion of societal impoliteness about the whole thing, whether it be inflicting ourselves on others or the idea that one simply does not impose one's own problems on others.

And so we clink off each other like marbles in a bag, a description I read long ago.

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The reality is that sometimes - through circumstances, odd comments, or simple observation, we learn more than we intend.

I am thinking of the moment of various coworkers I have that - although I officially do not "know" anything - know that they are going through significant life struggles and changes of their own.  Were I to ask after it, it would of course be denied or laughed off as a temporary state of affairs. And yes from the report of those I trust and are "In the know" (as the kids say), the events and struggles are real.

Everyone, they say, is fighting a battle no-one knows anything of.

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I have to remind myself of this when situations arise and I become frustrated or even upset with them (and yes, even I can become frustrated or upset with people).  I have to remind myself that sometimes they are reacting out of the place of their challenge or hurt or pain, that sometimes them showing up at all is a victory.  I have to remind myself that separating the situation and the person is necessary: as I have commented to my adopted work children, I always love the person, I may not always love them in their role.

Which makes going out of my way to practice kindness even the more important.  At the very least, I should not add to their load by my own behaviour; at the most, that one kindness may be the thing that helps them through day.

Likely those simple acts cost me little except inconvenience and perhaps dealing with my own issues of pride and always needing to be right.  The benefit they provide may be immeasurable - after all, who among us knows if we are that one particular thread of kindness that day, perhaps the only one they may see?

A Year Of Kindness (XXIII): Kindness Is Not An Act...

 

People can fake kindness for a bit, but eventually it comes across as forced or self-seeking.  

The very kindest of people do not so much do kindness as they are kindness; it is their very nature.

A Year Of Kindness (XXII): Make Their Day

 

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The more I ponder kindness and look for quotes and thoughts on it, the more that I find that I am realizing the seeming ordinariness of it.

Yes, of course there are extravagant gestures of kindness (the Cross being the biggest ever, of course).  And yet, extravagant gestures are very often a one time sort of event.

Most kindness is the sort of thing I can practice every day.  It really can be the simplest of gestures:   A smile.  Holding the door.  Giving a small gift to someone for no reason.  Listening to someone who needs to talk.  

It is odd to me that I think about such things as a sort of choice:  Should I do this?  Could I do this?

Sometimes it is an inconvenience.  Sometimes it is something that costs us something.  But given that kindness is something that I as a Christian am a beneficiary of from God, why do I even ask the question?  If I have the opportunity to make someone's day better, should I not always take it?

I suspect - sadly - my unwillingness to do so reveal more about me and my own self centeredness.

If by doing an act of kindness I can make someone else's day, I should being doing it.  Full stop.

After all, life is hard.  By kindness I can at least make it a bit better, even if for a short time.

A Year Of Kindness (XX): Leave A Trail Of Kindness

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We all leave a trail in our life.

We are all trailblazers: every day we move into the virgin wilderness of the new day.  Every night we make our campfire in the evening, the day's trail behind us lost in the darkness of time.

The trail itself is, for the most part invisible, a series of events and encounters and feelings which for the most part are transient in nature (but not always).  There are times we leave physical presence, for good or ill - a gift, a thing built; on the other side an injury, a scar physical or psychic.   But really, we cannot see the trail we leave for the most part.

But that trail never really disappears.

I can recall kindnesses and injuries done to me years ago from the trails of others:  the times I was excluded or I in turn excluded others, the times things were taken from me or I took things from others, words of kindness or ill intent for which I can still picture the sound of the voice in my head and the place it happened.

Every day, a trail in the lives of others.

We cannot change the trail up to this point: it is engraved in the merciless stone of the past with a pen made of adamantium.  But the trail today is ours for the writing:  we can leave whatever sorts of mark we want on the paper of today.  And it lies within our power to leave a trail of kindness, of thoughts and memories that will follow our memory in the lives of others with joy and encouragement and good feelings.

No matter what, we will leave that trail.  And if we are doing so anyway, why not a trail of kindness?

A Year Of Kindness (XIX): The Smallest Act Of Kindness

 

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We can have the greatest intensions in the world.  But the smallest act of kindness rendered is greater than all the intentions that are never kept.

A Year Of Kindness (XVIII): Be The Reason Someone Smiles

 

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Sometimes we confuse the size of a kindness with its result. 

Certainly I am guilty of thinking I have to do some grand gesture.  Turns out that can be completely wrong:  sometimes people do not want the big grand gesture or are embarrassed if you do it because you are drawing attention to them in the wrong way.

A smile, a kind word, even a moment where we are able to express that in some way we know what they are going through and care, that no matter what the circumstances they are in they are still worthy simply because they are created in the image of God.

After all, no kindness - no matter how small - is ever wasted.