The kindness beneath the chaos

For the past year, I’ve been sitting with the topic of kindness - exploring it through stories and research. When we first gathered to discuss this, someone asked a key question - what kindness actually is. As people started to share their perspectives we realised how diverse and multi-layered it could be - and how interesting it would be to explore this through the research and stories.

I feel a deep sense of gratitude for that decision as it opened up such a wide and varied spectrum of kindness. While I felt a resonance with each sharing of kindness, each individual expression added a new shade, showing an aspect that hadn’t been fully visible before, creating such a vivid and rich picture.

One of the sharings that uncovered something deep was the conversation with Nausheen. What struck me was her understanding that kindness is ‘something that’s so much of our day-to-day being that we don’t notice it…It’s like, do we notice that we’re breathing?’ Many others had shared that kindness is somehow intrinsic to humanity but this example of the breath really helped me to see how kindness is this soft, gentle layer which holds much of our life.

With this idea I started to see kindness everywhere - and in the most unexpected places. As I drove into the small village nearby the road was busy as usual with traffic. But this time, instead of seeing the other drivers as selfish "others" who were just in my way, I suddenly saw the small gestures of care as we weaved through traffic.

I realised that while we drive for our own safety, we are also instinctively caring for each other. We don't want to cause pain. We want to avoid the dog’s tail, the snake, the lizard. We don't want to be the cause of someone's fall. When we look with an open heart, we see that we are all, in our own way, trying to navigate life with kindness.

Unfortunately, the next day, "life happened." A friend was knocked off his bike on that same road and suffered some nasty injuries. It was an event that came from a tangle of intentions: my friend acting from kindness to avoid a dog, and another who simply wasn't awake to the moment.

While this shook me, when I looked deeper, I saw that the driver behind didn’t act out of unkindness, but out of ignorance. They were simply caught up in their own story, lost in the "mental drama" that keeps us from being present.

It reinforced for me that kindness needs the soil of mindfulness to truly flower. Without the clarity of being "awake," we miss the moments where our care is needed most. Without awareness, we don’t see where kindness is needed - for ourselves or for others.

You can find out more about the kindness project - and read the collection of kindness stories - by clicking here.