If you miss an opportunity to share with someone your kindness, that person is going to live their life without that act of quotidian love, which is as powerful as anything grandiose, it adds happiness for that person and the overall happiness of the world, one love at a time.

I had an opportunity to be kind and I failed to carry it out because I was shy. More than that, I was scared that opening my mouth would be met with judgment, as if my words were not kind, they were ridiculous. It is okay to be ridiculous, if you are kind and it backfires, nothing is lost, just your pride, and that can always be compromised without serious offence.

A thought brews, you let it marinate, you think to yourself, wow, that person has a great sweater on. Keeping that to yourself is an act of wastefulness, it is a missed opportunity to make someone’s day. Something so simple as an act of kindness can resonate with someone who knit that sweater over the course of months, or perhaps it is a gift from an aunt. It doesn’t take much work to be kind and make that person, without exaggeration, a little happier, that adds up to more happiness in the world.

Can you imagine an alternate universe where one does not receive an act of everyday kindness? That would be a lack of meaning, the difference between a sweater that retires to the closet, versus a sweater that is worn in public again. 

It is a waste to think something positive and not share it. Even if it does feel embarrassing, you can make someone’s day, perhaps the more embarrassing it is the better and more original that act of kindness. 

There are no rules to kindness. Kindness: Fullstop? It is supposed to be intelligent kindness that requires understanding the social context, the way we interact with people, how we regard ourselves in relation to other complicated, beautiful, loving human beings. 

In other words, being kind is complicated and there are no rules. We are all kind when it comes down to it. Some of us limit ourselves to being kind to one’s family, or community, or nation, and/or the world. Kindness goes beyond a ranking of influence, one act of kindness in a coffee shop can realistically be compared to the highest act of goodwill, tenderness, and generosity. It is not easy, but it is not hard. It actually costs very little to share a moment with someone, a connection that can be forged with a little bit of effort. A little bit of kindness goes a long way, that’s what they say, and it is true. 

Maybe you don’t have nice thoughts and that means you have no kindness to share. One solution is to take anything you don’t like, and flip it. If you do not like a man’s purple dyed hair, that is a good opportunity to tell him, “I love your hair!” That is surprisingly effective for the emotionally challenged. No one has to know how gnarled your soul is, and that is not your fault, but it is your responsibility to hide any ugliness within you.

It is timely. You have a small window to execute kindness in all the situations you are presented with. You cannot be late when it comes to delivering the right message at the right time. You might miss it, and that person’s day will not be as happy as it could have been.

There is a certain amount of guilt that one should feel having missed an opportunity for kindness. The world will be a little less happy without your courage to share, to put yourself out there, and risk being a little silly.

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What’s the difference between kindness and love?

Degree? Type? Range? Time? Faith? 

An act of love for one another is an act of kindness, but is an act of kindness necessarily an act of love? Perhaps an act of love requires you to dig deep and bare your soul to another person. It costs you something, it is a case of giving oneself over to something bigger, one person at a time. Love for one person or for many more is a singular contribution that can be something meaningful, inspiring, and transformative. 

A missed opportunity to love is even more serious than a missed opportunity to be kind. An act of love could lift someone up from sheer depression. Or you could fail them, and without love in their life that depression could get deeper and deeper. Love can require sacrifice, it might genuinely cost something from you, it is not easy, it can be hard. 

Love is an imperative. LOVE: FULLSTOP. We are surrounded by messages, religious and secular, sacred and profane, of the importance of loving other people. The more messages we receive the wider the span of love we can act on. In that way, it is not FULLSTOP, it requires attention to detail, understanding of social contexts, and the variety of ways we can practice our faiths. Love should be intelligent, qualified, quantified, contextualized, stretched, contracted, spread, and shared. 

We cannot judge someone’s level of love, we all love in the best we can, that cannot be compared. We all have the same capacity to carry out acts of love. Whether we did so in the past, or whether our love is to be carried out in the future, we all contain the promise to love intimately and expansively. No one is incapable of bringing love into the world, each of us in our own unique way, and you have all the time in the world to make it happen. 

Whereas on an individual level we cannot judge or compare our love to one another, as a world we can with great precision say that there is a lack of love between us as a human race. Something is going wrong. We are lovely people, we are full of love, but it has not stretched to encompass wider circles of concern. In other words, the ‘others’ do not get the love they need and that they deserve.

At this juncture in history, we have never needed each other’s love more than now. We are kind to each other, for the most part, but can we dig deep and make a sacrifice for the sake of love in our world? 

Kindness is great. Love is above and beyond. Kindness makes the world a better place to live in. Love transforms the world, brings us together, establishes peace, and not only makes the world a better place, it ensures that we have a place at all.

I’ll lay on another guilt trip, more severe than missing an opportunity to be nice, and that is the failure to love intimately and/or expansively. In whichever order makes sense to you, there will always be an imperative to love. No one can tell you how to do that. You inevitably will have examples to follow, but you must apply it to your loved ones and/or selflessly give your love to those who don’t have love.

I’ve felt guilty about not doing enough, and I deserve to be guilty because I did not do enough. You can always do more, and the impetus for doing more is calculating what you failed to do, and promise to do better next time. 

I have loved expansively. I went above and beyond the normal range of empathy for others and carried out bold actions on the street for the down and out. I do neither of those any more. For the most part, I do not love expansively anymore, at least I don’t act on it. I love my family, and that’s about it. I am kind, but fresh out of selfless expansive love. Can I be judged by my past, or the way I narrowly define kindness now, with what energy I have left?

.ME Maybe I’ll make a comeback. Maybe kindness builds upon itself, enough kindness ricocheting around might cumulatively amount to communal, societal, and/or worldly love.

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Rudeness and Hate? Are those opposites of kindness and love? Or a different beast altogether? I don’t know. Is it a product of carelessness and/or a deliberate attempt to cause harm? Is it a breach of faith, where you know deep down what the right thing to do is, but you do not do it anyway? 

Kindness is knowing the right thing to do, and doing it on time every time. Rudeness is knowing the right thing to do and passively deciding not to do it. Hate is deliberately and conscientiously doing wrong. You go out of your way, purposely trying to make someone’s life worse, adding up a world that is far less kind and far less loving.

For beginners, start by being kind to yourself. You don’t deserve to beat yourself up, you are worthy of kindness, no matter who you are and no matter what you might have done. For example, if you knit a beautiful sweater, it is enough to be proud of what you have accomplished, you don’t need anyone to tell you how beautiful your sweater is. You don’t need anyone to validate who you are deep down, ultimately you know yourself and you don’t need anyone to tell you who you are and what is lovely about you. 

There will be a host of negative influences surrounding you as you try to make your way, so walk with peace. Don’t hurt yourself, don’t blame yourself, don’t critique yourself, definitely don’t hate yourself. There are too many haters in this world and you do not need to be the victim of your own hate, that just defeats the purpose of being a positive person–no love for yourself, there will probably be no love left over for anyone else. 

So, I conclude this small piece by asking what is urgent/timely/pressing about this imperative. What is urgent is that there is a chronic case of rudeness and hate in the world. What is timely is how essential it is to inject kindness and love into this world now–with expedience. It happens in real-time, it is often not deliberate, it is a lightning flash of inspiration that one must share in that moment, or you can miss it. Delay and the opportunity is lost. Unrealized kindness is a tragic waste of a positive thought or feeling. If anything positive pops into your head, check it out, and do your best to deliver, and even if it seems silly, it isn’t. Pressing, the rampant unhappiness all around you. Unhappiness is pressing down on all of us. Be buoyant, be positive, be kind and be loving. Don’t be rude. Don’t be hateful. Try to be nice. I’ll try to do the same (ME.)