Kindness = A creative mind + a brave heart

Kindness. You've probably been reading about the need for it and so you've been thinking about it on some level.

Matthew Dowd thinks it's not the same as being nice.  He said, "Being nice is really about how we want to be perceived; being kind is about who we are."

And kindness is not the same as being pleasant. Pleasant means you don't ruffle feathers or create havoc. 

No, kindness requires something of us. It asks us to behold the

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thing that irritates us, be it crass person, a greedy thief, a self-righteous demagogue,  or a lying-to-your-face insult to humanity, and, instead of judging that person, we instead think about what that person is REALLY after.

Perhaps the crass person really just wants attention, and doesn't know there are better ways of getting it. Perhaps the thief wants to feel he has enough. And maybe the demagogue wants to feel understood, or perhaps she doesn't know what it feels like when opposing points of view can be held simultaneously. And the liar, perhaps he really wants to tell the truth but doesn't know how.

As you can imagine, coming up with all these alternative explanations required me to use my creative mind. My basic mind, when it's in default mode, simply looks at things and forms opinions. That's what it's designed to do. It's an efficient machine, after all. But when I indulge my creative and critically thinking mind to come up with other reasons, it immediately starts coming up with other theories. Your creative mind probably does the same thing.

But there's another element required to move past our immediate judgments. It is our brave heart. It takes a certain courage, at least at first, to summons the will to dismiss our judgments and to be open to another explanation that might nullify or weaken our judgments.

At a primal level, we're designed to make judgments. It's in our god-given nature to make these judgments based little data. It's how we've survived the eons.  But we're usually not living in a eat-or-be-eaten world. Which means many of our rashly made judgments aren't as sound as we'd like them to be considered.

In other words, our judgments probably aren't as right as we'd like to believe.

So, let's see what we can each do in the coming weeks and year to be kind more often. Notice our judgments, but don't immediately believe them. Wonder at how they might be right, and how they may be quite wrong. And wonder what the object of of our scorn might really be after, and just doesn't know how to attain it.

Blessings!

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