Being kind and compassionate is a mindset. Just like working out with a long term fitness and lifestyle goal in mind, it takes practice, patience, commitment, and perseverance. Realistically, being outwardly kind for extended periods of time is often difficult due to the sheer enormity of the concept, and in taking a look at the daily interactions of society, it seems extended periods of authentic compassion are challenging for a large section of our overall population.
Being kind at its most basic level is fairly common. Being friendly, caring, and helpful to friends and family, for the most part, comes somewhat naturally and can be commonly witnessed in our daily lives. Behaviors such as sharing a meal, driving a friend to the airport, or calling home to say you are running late are all indicators that we are capable of regularly considering and acting upon others needs and perspectives.
However, most of these actions can ultimately deceive us into an over-inflated sense of personal compassion and kindness. For the most part, acting on the needs of our close personal relations can be either pre-scheduled or fit somewhat seamlessly into our daily routines and expectations. Thus these behaviors do not push us to begin expanding a consciousness of authentic awareness and empathy. After all, caring for the one’s we love is how most of us were raised. We were taught to do it as we learned to walk.
In extending the aforementioned metaphor of working out, we are simply maintaining the everyday level of fitness that allows us to climb stairs and walk through the mall, as opposed to beginning to develop diet and fitness routines that would allow us to become competitive athletes.
Training ourselves in the realm of kindness and compassion requires a similar commitment. In order to really begin making a difference within ourselves and our community, we must begin exercising our kindness in ways we are not used to. This in and of itself becomes quite complicated when transposed upon our daily lives.
We have also become somewhat accustomed to overt acts of kindness and “random acts of kindness” such as holding a door open for someone or buying a stranger a cup of coffee, but again, these actions can be done when and where we personally decide. They are not necessarily internalized. While they are indeed kind, and encouraged, they are not enough.
Kindness and compassion are ultimately based on consideration for others. Consideration for loved ones, strangers we see, strangers we interact with, and strangers across the world that we will never cross paths with.
Consideration means crossing the street a little faster when a car stops for us at a crosswalk. It means thinking about strangers as human beings with families and problems instead of labeling them as gangsters, or rednecks, or liberals, conservatives, or whatever other media-influenced stereotype immediately pops into our mind. Consideration means properly recycling old batteries so they do not end up in the landfill of a third world country contaminating the drinking water of young children we never knew existed.
It means honestly considering both sides of a controversial issue, giving credence to both sides, and understanding that the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle, far away from the politically and financially motivated extremes espoused by pundits, politicians, and professionals who in the end are most likely far more financially secure than the vast majority of those they manipulate into political strife.
Consideration means developing an understanding that almost none of our actions are isolated incidents. Our daily choices, however small they may seem, have the potential to ripple around the globe and in the current state of mass-globalization the reality of human inter-connectivity and it's consequences are becoming more evident each and every day.
With that understanding, it is obvious that none of us can individually solve the latest conflict in the Middle East nor can we personally end world hunger. The only thing we can do is be kind and compassionate to EVERYONE around us and be considerate of those we will never have the chance to meet. It is not our place or purpose to decide if certain people, lifestyles, or cultures are more, or less worthy of kindness and compassion, because in the end we are all equally worthy, but without deep-seeded, internalized consideration for the entire human population the world doesn't seem to stand much of a chance.
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It's beyond my family, my friends, my 'hood, my city, my country...
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