A few words about practicing acts of kindness
The other day I was at the store counter ready to pay my bill, when I realized I was a dollar short.
The woman behind me reached into her purse and gave me a dollar. When I thanked her and asked how I could pay the money back, she simply said, “pass it on to the next person you can help.”
It was a simple, seemingly spontaneous act of kindness that lifted my spirit in times that seem loud, selfish, and without much compassion. Over 200 years ago the English poet Wordsworth must have felt as I did when he wrote that the best part of a person’s life was the “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”
The older I have gotten the more important this wisdom about kindness becomes. It may be important to be smart or talented but in the long run, kindness becomes the glue that holds the broken fragments of our lives together. When it comes time to depart this world, it’s not so important how much money or fame a person possesses, but the kindnesses given or received that matter most.
Kindness has two faces: one inside and the other outside. The inner face of kindness is toward yourself. Being kind toward oneself means accepting your shortcomings and failures as part of the maturing process and encouraging yourself for taking new steps toward being all you want to be. The other face is external. This means accepting others, shortcomings and all, treating them as you would wish to be treated.
Between 800 and 300 B.C.E., many of the world’s great spiritual teachers emerged — Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Lao Tzu. And the concept common to them was that of compassion, the Golden Rule in other words — treating others as you wish to be treated. It’s an easy rule to remember but a difficult one to live.
There are some who believe we are entering another axial age when our means of communication will help us see the world as one and every person a member of the human family. That’s a bold vision but not one that seems to permeate our social orders these days as nations turn inward toward themselves.
Of course, the alternative vision is more troublesome, of a world where nations turn against nations, where money rules and the poor get poorer, and where eventually we destroy the very planet upon whom our existence depends.
But I have a different view, more practical I believe. What if we began with a simple goal to be more compassionate in our lives, among those closest to us and to those we do not know at all and to ourselves as well. Perhaps we cannot change the world to a kinder, gentler one, but we can begin with ourselves and create a ripple in the ocean of life.
Author Henry James reportedly said to a young nephew when asked what was most important: “There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.”