(Japanese Kanji for "Kindness")
During a recent conversation with a friend, I was reminded that kindness should be a way of being and not a goal. Goals are always entangled with self-interest, even the good ones. We can have compassion and act with kindness when interacting with the people we feel pity for, with strangers, people we perceive to be in great need such as disaster victims, starving children in other countries, etc. What I was reminded of was how easy it is to forget to be kind to the people we love, the people in our daily lives, those we live with and those we interact with on a regular basis. Our conversation wasn't about either one of us, but more about the general state of the world, the economy, the news, and we agreed that if there was more kindness in our daily lives, perhaps the world would be a bit lighter. And so I offer the following words of wisdom collected from here and there since they explain the idea of kindness far better than I can:
"The Wise Woman's Stone"
A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman. "I've been thinking," he said, "I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone."
Author Unknown
Wise Quotes:
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
-Aesop
"We Make a Living by What We Get, We Make a Life by What We Give"
~Churchill
Namaste'
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