Kindness seems like an old-fashioned word. And it does have history. It apparently derives from or is related to words in Old English, Old Saxon, Proto-German and Old Norse that mean clan, family, child and son. To display “kindness” in its original sense was to behave to others as one would naturally want to behave to one’s own “kind,” that is, with courtesy, with helpful deeds and with compassion.
Kindness was a virtue held in high regard for century after century, authors Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argue in their book “On Kindness.” Maybe kindness was admired because it was recognized that kindness, with its requirement for sympathetic understanding and openness to others’ needs, demanded a lot of the person offering it. Clearly, it can be hazardous to be open-hearted. Our caring and sympathy may be rejected or exploited. It takes courage to risk that. It takes courage to be kind.
So why bother with kindness? Well, some of us don’t. In recent centuries there has been less cultural appreciation for the sort of mutual belonging and interdependence out of which kindness grows. Instead, we have come to admire fierce independence and self-reliance as the highest forms of personal development. We are inclined to see kindness as a ploy for the manipulative or a crutch for the weak. Kindness seems to have fallen out of favor.
But what are we missing by turning away from kindness as a virtue to develop and a practice to cultivate? Is a society that rebuffs the development of kindness diminished by its lack? How are we personally affected by the scarcity of kindness? Isn’t a life without kindness a little bleaker, a little colder, a little harsher?
Poet John O’Donohue once claimed that despite all the harshness that hovers round us and even seems to threaten our world these days, human hope has survived because of an instinct we possess. And that instinct tells us that at the heart of reality, deep down where we cannot see but only sense it, kindness holds sway. Kindness, despite our recent dismissal of its significance, is at the very heart of things.
Perhaps it was, after all, an unshakable divine kindness that brought the world into being, that spread the stars across the heavens, that formed the land and seas and creatures, and finally breathed its own breath into dust from the ground and made a human being. That this beautiful world exists is a kindness. That we are born to live in it is a kindness. That we bear the image of the divine likeness and its very breath in our own being is a kindness.
So why wouldn’t we want to assist, and enhance and magnify the divine kindness that undergirds everything? Be swift to love and make haste to be kind! Kindness never goes out of fashion.
