BE KIND

Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash

‘My religion is simple, my religion is kindness’ The Dalai Lama

As someone brought up in a harsh religion, I welcome that simple statement. Notions of sin, judgment and separation were so formative in my early years that my journey has been (and probably always will be) to develop a kinder, more compassionate and more inclusive approach.

But I’m troubled by how the notion of ‘being kind’ has become a fashionable refrain that has shifted the meaning of kindness, so that I now have a visceral reaction to posters, t-shirts and comments that urge me to ‘be kind’. The current fad of stifling discussions around sensitive topics by smothering them under a blanket of ‘kindness’ lacks, I suggest, intellectual curiosity and compassion. We learn from each other when we can talk, listen, agree and disagree in a spirit of mutual respect and compassion. ‘Being kind’ has become a means of silencing, excluding and denigrating. It is the sugar-coated version of ‘Shut the Fuck Up!’

Kindness, suggests Brené Brown, is clarity. Her mantra is ‘clear is kind, unclear is unkind’:

“Feeding people half-truths or bullshit to make them feel better (which is almost always about making ourselves feel more comfortable) is unkind.’

These days, I prefer to use the word ‘compassion’, in its original sense of ‘suffering alongside’. It recognises the commonality of our human experience of suffering, and - as I think the Dalai Lama might say - we all have the same means of freeing ourselves from suffering.

My watchword these days is Kurt Vonnegut’s saying ‘We are all in this together, whatever it is.’ It is the recognition that whatever our experience of ‘it’ is, whatever beliefs we hold, whatever barriers that may exist between us, suffering is the human experience and recognising that commonality can be transformational.