Tag: kindness
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Be Kind to Each Other
If you accept that you are mortal. If you see all living beings as kindred spirits. If you understand the value of “the Golden Rule” and find it to be the the only path worthy of consideration. Then there is nothing left to do but be kind. Kindness isn’t easy. And it’s not fun and light…
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“Simple But Not Easy”
I don’t remember quite where I first encountered the phrase “simple but not easy,” but after a recent encounter it’s been stuck in my head. I believe deeply that all the important insights in life are simple. Really really really stupidly simple. The reason the phrase is stuck in my head, though, is that there’s an often…
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Models of Kindness
There’s a saying I’m quite fond of: “Never compare your insides to anyone else’s outsides.” There are a million variations on the theme, but the message is always the same: your internal experience and the outward behaviors you notice and find notable in others aren’t really the same process or a reasonable basis for comparison.…
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The Vulnerability of Kindness
Vulnerability is scary. Whether you’re a wildebeest parching your thirst from a possibly-crocodile-infested pond or a person sitting in a room about to tell someone a truth that you’ve hidden for a while, it’s frightening stuff. Your heart races. Your skin shines. Your muscles tense. Your voice shakes. The truth of a situation is naked.…
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Kind Awareness
Fundamentally, nothing can respond to a stimuli it doesn’t perceive. Whether a robot car, a wolf, a rose bush, a person, or a rock. Not a single one of them can respond to things they aren’t aware of. Bubbles limit kindness, primarily because they inhibit awareness. When you’re caught in your own story about how…
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Puncturing Your Bubble for Kindness
You live inside your head. It’s fundamentally true: try to define who you are without including the large mass behind your eyeballs and you’ll flounder. But for most of us, most of the time, we live inside our head in a more casual sense. We’re caught up inside the machinations of our neuroses, missing most of…
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The Long Game of Kindness
Living creatures, by their nature, find it hard to think, plan, and act for the long term. For millennia life on this planet has survived because it acts, first and foremost, to do what it is best for it in the short term. This near-term greed allows living creatures to keep being alive, and that’s…
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Why Kindness is Hard
I wrote last week about how important I think kindness is. And about how its truest form is a positve action rather than the mere absence of negative actions. That, and a few other things I’ve seen lately has lead me to get thinking a little bit about why this thing called kindness that we almost…
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The Difference between Being Nice and Not Being Mean
If there’s one thing that I’m certain of its that there is a big difference between not being actively mean to someone and being kind to them. And yet for a long time I didn’t realize there was a difference. It not as though if you’d asked me if those two sequences of words had…