It Takes Courage To Be Kind
It all really does boil down to this question; live in fear, or be courageous?
There is a way I should treat people regardless of how they treat me. And that way should be littered with kindness.
I haven’t been doing that.
These days I still can’t believe kindness and love could mean so much. I understand now that they’re both habits we can practice, not just words we throw around to seem virtuous.
But knowing that doesn’t make kindness any easier. Not with history the way it is. Not when kindness is a rare gem most of us are unwilling to share.
The solution is simple enough; be more kind to each other. But who goes first? And what happens when it’s me and the bitterness and cruelty doesn’t disappear? Am I just supposed to keep kindness coming? My mind says so.
Whenever I close my eyes and ask the same question I ask every morning, “what do I do with today?” a voice says, “be kind.” I ignore it most days, chalk it up to a lack of imagination and guilt. But I’m starting to see the reason my answer is always the same. I can be more kind. A lot more.
But first, I have to be courageous.
Many call courage the mother of all virtues. That qualities like trust, passion, loyalty, and justice cannot flow without courage. And they’re right. To be unkind, therefore, is to be scared.
Scared of getting hurt, scared of sticking your neck out only to have it cut, terrified of pouring into someone who will never pour back into you. Scared of history repeating itself.
It all really does boil down to this question; live in fear, or be courageous?
Will I let kindness flow no matter what the cosmos returns to me? Or am I too petrified, too full of ego and vengeance to be all I can be?
“Wrestle to be the man philosophy wished to make you,” Marcus Aurelius said.
And he was an emperor. And I don’t think he ever stopped wrestling. I don’t think any of us truly do. If we do, it’s certainly not because we’ve arrived or topped out on courage. It’s because we’ve started to hate what we find in ourselves when we dig too deep.
For me, that’s fear, masked as anger — a lack of courage. The kind of colossal courage it takes to be kind.
