Category Archives: Kindness

Don’t Settle for Nice

Posted on by

“Kindness begins with the understanding that we all struggle.” ~Charles Glassman

Dscn1300When I talk to groups about kindness, I am always asked if there is a difference between being kind and being nice. For some, the difference may be merely semantic, but I think there’s more to it. While the outward behavior may appear the same, if we dig down, we see that there are significant differences in attitude, intention, and even energy between nice and kind.

Nice is doing the polite thing, doing what’s expected of me. I can be nice without expending too much effort, without making a connection. I can even be nice and still merely tolerate someone with my teeth gritted in a false smile, while making judgments about them and inwardly seething with impatience.

Kindness asks more of me. It asks me to withhold judgment, to genuinely care about the other person and whether they’re getting what they need from our interaction. Kindness forges connections. It also makes me vulnerable, because I don’t know how my kind action will be received—it may be rejected or misunderstood. With kindness, I risk jumping into unknown waters; with niceness, I stay safely on shore. Continue reading →

2023 Reboot

Posted on by

“No act of kindness is too small. The gift of kindness may start as a small ripple that over time can turn into a tidal wave affecting the lives of many.” ~Kevin Heath 

DSCN3351When I started this blog in January of 2015, it was going to be a one-year deep-dive into kindness. It has resulted in eight years of diligent and then sporadic blogging, mostly about kindness, but sometimes other topics that caught my fancy (jazz, baseball, cats, books, nature, politics….). It also resulted in my 2018 book, A Year of Living Kindly (YOLK), which is now in its 9th printing, with multiple literary awards, and several foreign language editions (that’s the end of the shameless self-promotion, I promise). Another result: gratitude—so much gratitude—for this blogging community and the friends I have made through it, as well as the wonderful people I’ve met through my publisher, book talks, book clubs, and YOLK events.

As we commence 2023, my hope is that enough of us are tired of divisive politics, rampant incivility, and misguided actions driven by fear and prejudice, and we’re ready to transform the world by actively choosing kindness. Realizing that in my first and most prolific year of blogging about kindness, there weren’t many people following this blog, I thought I’d revisit and update some of those early posts. There’s more to say on some topics, and less on others. There are nuances and new ahas.

For those of you who have followed this blog since the earliest days, thank you! I hope you’ll still find new ideas and good reminders. For more recent community members, may you find what you were hoping for when you signed up to follow. I’ll try to keep posts short and to-the-point.

For this first “rebooted” post, let’s revisit one big reason why kindness matters, and why we need to choose it every day: Continue reading →

A Kinder Year….

Posted on by

“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done.…” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

A Year from Now 1I like to think that the new year offers us a reset button. Heaven knows we need one—after being caught for years in an endless maze of election deniers, science deniers, common sense deniers, and, yes, even bird deniers.

Kindness took some hits, as we saw personal attacks on and by political candidates reach new highs, er, lows. And we saw people elected to respected national offices raise their middle fingers to opponents both literally and figuratively in peerless demonstrations of class and refinement. And we saw a former president consign his deceased first wife to eternal rest near the first tee of a third-rate golf course in New Jersey. Continue reading →

My Bully Pulpit

Posted on by

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” (James Baldwin)

DSCN3317I don’t have kids. Every time I am moved to write about kids, I feel obliged to footnote that fact. I’ve never been in the trenches of raising them, of watching them take first steps and then fall on their butts, of witnessing them learn and grow and miraculously develop into autonomous little humans. I haven’t vicariously shared their wins, their losses, or their wounds—and felt these so deeply that I feared my heart would break.

Nonetheless, my heart does break when I read about the gauntlet of bullying so many children face on their journey to adulthood. I’ve written about bullying a lot, in this blog, and in my book.

For some kids, the pandemic offered a respite from bullying. Remote schooling provided a break from name-calling, playground taunts, and the accompanying shame and insecurity. However, remote schooling came with a cost—many costs. We’re learning that many kids are now lagging a year or more behind in academic skills. They’re reading at lower levels, and testing poorly in nearly every subject.

And it’s not just academics that have fallen behind. Studies are now showing that kids have lost a year or more in their social development. One way this is manifesting now that schools have resumed in-person learning is that bullying is back and often worse than ever. Continue reading →

This Has To Stop

Posted on by

“Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.” (Karen Armstrong)

Welcome, Messrs. DeSantis, Abbott, and Carlson,Why do we tolerate bullies and bullying? The moment we see one person abusing or belittling another we should be stepping in. Are we just so accustomed to the bullying behaviors of a former president and his cult following that we shrug our shoulders and say, “what are you gonna do?”?

What kind of example are we setting for young people?

This week, the world saw astonishingly cruel public bullying toward a group of migrants by Florida governor and presidential wannabe Ron DeSantis. The Venezuelan families were in Texas, in the process of going through proper channels to seek asylum in America. In a cheap and sadistic play for attention, DeSantis used Florida taxpayer money to pick up migrant families in San Antonio and fly them in two chartered jets to Martha’s Vineyard. There, he essentially dumped them for the local residents and municipality to deal with. He sent a videographer along to record the Northern outrage that he was sure would ensue. DeSantis claimed he was “protecting” Florida by flying the migrant families to Massachusetts. He did not elaborate on how kidnapping people in Texas protects Florida.

Is kidnapping too strong a word? How about human trafficking? Certainly coercion. Continue reading →