Living a Life of Kindness

One of the core messages that is woven throughout this holiday season is to be kind.  This call to kindness is nestled at the heart of every religion and to consciously commit to being kind can literally transform the world. In order to live a life of kindness, it is helpful to understand that we are all in this together for we are accustomed to seeing everything outside of us as other—separate and disconnected from us.   

Something very radical happened when Einstein and then Hubbell discovered the expanding universe. It began to seep into our collective awareness that absolutely everything came from the same place and that the dance of life is an interconnected web of unfolding.  In other words, there is no other. 

One of the most skillful ways to cut through the illusion of separation and struggle we live in most of the time is to act in our lives as if everything were a part of us—for it truly is.  There is so much more that we have in common than we have in differences.  Your skin color, your religious beliefs and sexual preference, and possibly even your whole view of life may be different than mine, but we come out of the same ground of being and share the same air, water and planet. At the root of our existence we also carry the same fears and desires, the same confusions and hopes, whether we live in a tribal village in Africa or a high rise in Manhattan.   

Think of a newborn child. We are all born in innocence, with the urge to love and be loved at the core of our being…..even Hitler and Osama bin Laden.  As the cauldron of daily life molds and shapes us, differences become more apparent, but still nestled in the heart of every being is an innocence and the desire to be happy.   

Your heart truly begins to respond when it realizes that pain and sorrow exist in absolutely everyone’s life.  There is a story about a woman who lost her young son, her only child.  When she approached the Buddha, overcome with grief, she said, “Master, please bring my boy back to life.”  The Buddha replied, “I will, but first you must go into the village and get me a handful of mustard seeds from a home where no one has lost a loved one to death.”  She went from house to house, searching for the seeds.  But when she asked if anyone in the home had died, the answer was always “yes.”  Finally, she realized that what had happened to her happens to everyone—that all who are born will also die and that all people experience loss.   

Your heart truly opens when it realizes that not only does death happen to each of us, but also upset, loss, heartache, craving, grief, judgment, confusion and despair, and that each of us is doing the best we know how with the challenges of life. Understanding this, you can respond to all that you see with kindness.   

Connecting with kindness as you hand your money to the clerk or smile at the other person in the elevator or listen to someone’s problems with compassion. This makes a difference in your life and in the life of the person you are connecting with. For true healing comes not from doing anything.  It comes from being with, whether it is a health condition in your body, an upset friend or a harried clerk.   

I leave you with a wonderful quote from author and philosopher Aldous Huxley:  

It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all of one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than, “Try to be a little kinder.”