Kindness

Kindness
Almost a decade ago I read Les Bienveillantes. http://goo.gl/7dr2Jm I translated the title as The Do-Gooders. In my personal lexicon do-gooders are the opposite of being kind, doing noticeable acts of seeming benevolence in order to gain recognition.
The translation scholars issued the English version with the title The Kindly Ones.http://goo.gl/uN5AHt

What is kindness? Is it the seduction of an unstable mind to carry out atrocious acts in the name of the goodness of society? This is essentially the essence of the novel? A man seduced into the Nazi party and then his mind carries him to further acts of violence.

In our interconnectivity we are called to distinguish between kindness and do-good acts.


Thanks to David Amerland for the thoughtful Sunday Read. 

#SundayRead   #kindness   #coreresponsibility   #corevalues  

Originally shared by David Amerland

Kindness

Kindness, by definition (https://goo.gl/nM9fr8) requires us to be considerate of others. Beyond consideration, however, an act of kindness requires something more. Something much deeper: It requires a leap of faith into the unknown. An abandonment of caution and a chance taken on another person, or in a moment, because the connecting thread is humanity, forged with empathy and the belief that all people feel the same. 

This is what makes it such a hard thing to do. Consider the difficulty, for a moment, of accepting a flower from a stranger who professes to perform an act of kindness: https://goo.gl/38ON9s. The difficulty in accepting it reflects a thick layer of mistrust, prejudice and fear – the very things that blight our world, the demons we are struggling against every day, at an individual level. 

We know kindness is important: http://goo.gl/T0kEVO. In many ways it’s like making a deposit in the bank of hope, never quite knowing whether you’d cash it in or not at any point but feeling better just knowing it’s there. 

We live busy lives in large cities, our sense of self lost in the impersonal tide of humanity we often find ourselves swimming in and yet, we can still display incredible moments of kindness to strangers: http://goo.gl/WXOcAQ. 

The connection, it seems, can be made even when the requests are for something personal and imminently stealable (like a mobile phone) - http://goo.gl/pn95mr. So strong is the need to sometimes simply do something that is not about us that even in cases where there is no social pressure and the odds of kindness emerging are logically zero, it miraculously happens: https://goo.gl/gjP2G4. 

So why does this happen? Why do we step up, even when no one is looking or when it logically is at our cost? 

The kindness project, is a reminder that acts of kindness need not be large: http://goo.gl/G6uliq. All they require is a little thought and a lot of humanity.  When our kindness is expressed it always appears to be in response to vulnerability. The perception that here is another human being, failing worse than we are. Kindness then helps us, in a small way, contribute to rebalancing the universe: http://goo.gl/sz5XY, making sure that ‘evil’ does not win, that darkness is kept at bay, that the world is actually something worth living in and worth fighting for. 

As Mark Traphagen  demonstrated so easily kindness can happen in our stride: https://goo.gl/mf494P about things which may not always be about what we do, but which they always are about who we are: https://goo.gl/NyjqFP. 

Psychologists say kindness is very important: https://goo.gl/DE6xFo. John Sweeney, in his TED Talk shows how three simple ingredients, incorporated in life, make a massive difference: https://goo.gl/Q1brIS. 

Dr. Dacher Keltner, head researcher at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, speaks on how kindness and generosity not only make us happy, but can contribute to good health! - https://goo.gl/8TKmhO. Kindness, he argues is biological. It makes us happy. It makes us feel. 

Kindness, also, is perhaps the evidence we need that in a world where we can sometimes feel alone and isolated, a world where we may feel that reaching out to people is hard to do and signals weakness, kindness is the connecting thread, the undefinable but ever present bind that simply says: We are here. All of us. And we are all together: https://goo.gl/Fbg8b0. 

I hope your Sunday’s started with a small act of kindness to your self: cue for rivers of coffee and mountains of sugary treats. The roll of honor demands no less than donuts, croissants, cookies, ice cream and chocolate cake. Have one awesome day, wherever you are.