Along with being Friday 13th (don’t panic) and
Children In Need day (again, don’t panic) today is:
World Kindness Day
Back in 1997, several humanitarian groups got together and
made a 'Declaration of Kindness,' everyone is encouraged to do the same on this
day. Every single thing you do counts apparently: donating clothes or food,
volunteering at the old people’s home, helping an old lady across the road
(whether she wants it or not), or simply making a few gestures toward strangers.
Now I’m used to making gestures at strangers, particularly
when I’m driving, but today I think I’ll make kind gestures, a smile or a wave
or maybe I could blow them a kiss, ‘cos that’s lucky too.
Kindness, what a big thing it is. Apparently there's a cup of it and you can kill
someone with kindness, although I don’t know how unless you have a kind of
knife. You also have to be cruel to be kind. Now this I know about. When I was a
child there was a lot of cruelty masquerading as kindness around. Punishing a
naughty child was the daily norm; a slap here, an insult there, hours of
endless bellowing and name calling. It was all for my own good you understand,
to knock some sense into me; a great example of kindness at its very best of being cruel to be kind.
World kindness Day is about being reminded that, despite what the
past has been, there really are kind people in the world. You hear about them all the time,
they are the ones who don’t walk past that guy sitting in the street on the
pavement, they’re the ones who stop and talk to him, the ones that applaud the
busker doing his best and slip a fiver into his hat. Sometimes I wonder why kindness can be so hard for us to
manage. If human beings are capable of tremendous kindness, why don’t more
people act with tremendous kindness more often? We are naturally inclined
that way, see most very young children playing in a group when one falls over,
but it’s almost as if, as we get older, we start to lose the impulse to be kind
and get wrapped up in our own world, too busy and too angry to help anybody else. After all, doesn't charity, and the kindness required to give it, begin at home?
Kindness has been the subject of a philosophical debate for
centuries. On the one hand you have those who advocate that people are
inherently kind, even if they don’t always manifest it. On the other are those
who believe that people are inherently selfish, and show kindness for
self-serving reasons. A kind of, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.
Maybe that is why lonely and often ill people are befriended and nursed by ‘friends’ who
go on to inherit their wealth. Yes there is kindness involved, but if you do it
for a reason is it really genuine kindness?
We live in a competitive society, sometimes kindness is mistaken
for weakness, and as we all know dogs eat dogs. Nobody wants to be that ‘sucker
that’s born every minute.’ As we grow older we grow tougher out of
self-protection, fear of losing, and slowly our natural childhood kindness is
eroded. It’s as if we lose the need to be kind, forget that there are other
people to consider other than ourselves in the tiny enclosed world we have created and inhabit. We lose our natural ability to be kind, but what we really lose is our humanity.
Take note if you ever read this Mr Shouty you fictitious character you. Your lack of kindness will not go unnoticed when it comes to the end. You are going to Hell in a handcart.
ReplyDeletePerhaps another word for kindness is love, because that is what you are displaying, an act given with expectation or even aknowledement, and even given to those who don't deserve it or have any regard for it. At least that is take on it, or my philosophy if you like which some would regard as weakness, and maybe exploit it.
ReplyDeleteSteve you are right. Love is kindness, although I think that you don't need love to be kind, just a conscience.
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