This year Random Acts of Kindness week is February 9th – 15th and I know we’ve all heard of the classic ways this is invited. “Pay for the order behind you in the drive-thru”, “Hold the door open for somebody” “You never know what someone else is going through, be kind”. These are all great ways to extend kindness to others, and I feel curious about how we can deepen the impacts of kindness.
What does it feel like when you take in another person’s kindness and truly digest it? How can we offer kindness, not from a place of making ourselves feel better, instead from a place of, “What does this person truly need in this moment?”. In the current climate of this country, where being pulled, and kept apart is becoming a daily occurrence, I feel the desire to move away from the “usual” kinds of kindness.
I think that for a lot of us, accepting true kindness can be an extremely daunting task. It requires vulnerability to allow someone to offer nourishment, with nothing expected in return. We are fully immersed in a society that values individualism over collective or community-based support. In many ways, we are still waking up to or remembering that not only do we not have to do this life alone, more importantly we cannot do this life alone.
I encourage you to see this year’s Random Acts of Kindness week as a moment of remembrance, an invitation to remember that we are here to be in community and be supported by community. See this as a call to action, slow down and look around you, we are all in need of kindness right now. Use this as a way to come back to the present moment and invite another into that present moment with you. Kindness does not need to be material or capitalistic, it is presence.
Be willing to create space for one another. Reach out to those in your communities, ask for and offer support. Advocate with your community, call in what is needed and when you have access to it, be the model for what you need. This can mean standing with people who are being dehumanized and show them humanity. Maybe you remind someone who’s struggling with their mental health how important and valued they are. In 2022, there were over 49,000 deaths by suicide in the U.S., that is one death every 11 minutes as referenced by the CDC. We are struggling as humans, and we need kindness now more than ever.
Call to action: Take a moment over the next week and look for the invitation into the present moment to truly be kind, and to find ways to offer kindness as a human being attuning to another human being.

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