Tag Archives: Unkindness

A Pause Gives Us the Gift of Grace

Posted on by
14

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~Victor Frankl

DSCN3073In recent weeks, we’ve reviewed the many benefits of kindness: health, relationships, life satisfaction, professional and business success, to name just a few. And we’ve talked about factors that can get in the way of our best kind intentions, including fear, time, apathy, obliviousness, and keeping score.

Let’s revisit the good stuff now, the skills of kindness—practices we can add to our daily lives to expand the kindness around us. Most of the skills to extending kindness and countering unkindness are pretty simple . . . but that doesn’t mean they’re always easy. They take practice. Kindness can’t be turned on and off like a faucet. It’s something we develop with practice—just as we improve in playing tennis or the saxophone.

A great way to think about the skills we’ll be exploring over the coming weeks is to see them as tools in our toolbox, or—using a more high-tech analogy—as apps we can download and call upon when needed.

For today, let’s look at a skill that sounds simple, but is tough in practice: learning to pause.

When we’re insulted or disrespected, we often respond in a knee-jerk fashion. We sling an insult right back, or we say something that we hope will put the offender in their place. It’s an automatic reaction, and it takes some effort not to succumb to it. But there are a few excellent reasons not to: Continue reading →

Removing Roadblocks

Posted on by
15

“When your mind changes, the world changes. When we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.” ~Mojo Sam

I’m trying to find a way to work an audacious understatement into today’s post, but really, there’s no connection. So, instead, I’ll briefly detour and congratulate the folks at Elon Musk’s SpaceX for quick thinking. When their next-generation Starship rocket blew up shortly after take-off on April 20, they were swift to admonish unimaginative journalists for calling it an explosion. No, the SpaceX geniuses corrected, it was a “rapid, unscheduled disassembly.” If there is a Cooperstown for euphemism, this one will get in on the first vote.

Now, back to kindness….

DSCN3280Previous posts explored two big barriers to kindness, time and fear. Let’s look at a few other obstacles that get in the way:

Being oblivious. We miss a lot of opportunities to extend a kindness or even receive one by not being present. By being glued to the petite screen of a smart phone or tablet. Or by being so wrapped up in our own internal drama that we simply don’t notice other people—the person behind us whom we fail to hold the door for, the driver trying to merge onto the highway, the co-worker frazzled by a deadline we could help them meet…. Be that person who pays attention, who puts down the phone and offers a hand or a word of encouragement. Continue reading →

There’s Always Time for Kindness

Posted on by
12

“Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.” ~Henri Frederic Amiel

DSCN0820We talked earlier about how fear seems to be the biggest and most common barrier to both giving and receiving kindness. But it’s not the only one.

Time is another big factor. We’re all overscheduled and overwhelmed. You wouldn’t think that should make a difference, but it does. In recent years, when I’ve spoken to groups and conferences about kindness, someone often comes up to me afterward and says, “I really would like to be kinder, but I’m just so busy. I don’t have time.”

I get that. Because it can take time to extend kindness. 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 →

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 →