Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to talk about the idea of embracing the spirit of kindness. It is a personal philosophy that I live by that I feel has made my life a lot better. When I was an adolescent, I made the decision that I wasn’t going to be the person that I was becoming. I decided that I was going to be someone better then I was. That was my first step towards this philosophy.
Perfection is not required. Which is a good thing because as humans, none of us can ever achieve perfection. What is required is that we wake up every day and consciously make the decision to do our best to be kind to other humans. It is a setting of a goal to increase our awareness of those around us and to act to help others whenever we are able. Most of the time these gestures of kindness will be small things that will go unnoticed by those around you. They are those little moments of helping, like opening the door for someone who has their hands full or saying hello to those around you. But it is also trying to take the feelings of others into consideration before you act.
Let’s start out by talking about what doing your best looks like. It will be different every day. That’s because every day we will have a different amount of energy or spoons available to us. Every day we will face different challenges and stressors. Because of that, our best will look very different from day to day. How well we did on any given day can’t be compared to another day because those days aren’t the same. We can never give more then we have and what we have each day available for giving will be different.
Another reason that our best changes over time is because we learn new things over time. Sometimes the things that we learn are skills, like how to handle difficult conversations better. Other times what we learn is how other people perceive the world, like learning that there are people who prefer to be treated differently then we expected. Doing our best means that we will adapt our approach as we learn and grow as people. But it also means that we can never judge our past selves by the things that we know now that we didn’t know then. We can’t expect someone to use a hammer if they don’t have that hammer. The same is true with our social skills and social understanding. We can only use the tools available to use in our tool box right now.
If we always do our best, then we can learn to let things go. Regardless of how well we plan or prepare for life, things will not always turn out as well as we hope for. Embracing the spirit of kindness is no different. There will be times that we don’t have the spoons to offer others anything of ourselves and we are wielding only knives. This means that there will be days that we are short tempered or inattentive towards those around us. On these days, we can see that it is an issue of lacking the knowledge or the spoons rather then failing as a person. We can then do our best to learn what we need to in order to do better in the future. And we should always strive to be gentle with ourselves for not always having something to give to others. That’s the nature of being human.
Embracing the spirit of kindness is about becoming more mindful of those around you. When you become more aware of those you share space with, it will become easier to see how assistance can be provided. It is about building yourself the opportunity that you didn’t have before. If you don’t notice that the person at the cash register is short a few dollars to pay for their groceries then you never have the option to give them those few dollars. This is how kindness is created. When you see these moments you might not have the ability to help, but seeing it is the first step. You can never help others if you are not aware of them.
For me, embracing the spirit of kindness includes giving emotional space to others. This is something that I am able to do most of the time, because I have been trained how to create emotional distance between myself and other people’s feelings. Look at your skill set and ask what you can regularly offer to other people that they can benefit from. Do you tell great jokes? Make a good cup of coffee? There are many things that we can do for each other that can help lift each other up without costing us money. But it does require that we make the effort and commitment to notice each other more.
Every day I promise myself that I will notice the people around and that I will do my best to act with kindness towards them. Doing this has allowed me to deepen the relationships in my life. I have learned a great deal about myself in the process of opening myself to other people. Since so much of our mental struggles stem from social neglect, I have also done a great deal of healing by allowing other people into my life. When we are kind to other people we create an environment where others are more likely to be kind towards us. This increases the chances of us having our emotional and social needs met. We cannot live in isolation. Embracing kindness is a way to open the door to your inner world and to invite other people to join you there.
Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like what you read, click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!
Zebra Pig 