Invicta Vlogs
Kindness
The best thing about school holidays is that you can afford to to slow down your pace of life, pondering activities that would bring you joy but that would be a luxury during term time. For me, the best treat is to have the time to just ‘potter about’. I hope you all have had the opportunity to treat yourselves with something special and have come back refreshed and ready for Term 2, which will undoubtedly fly by and fastforward us all to Christmas.
While pottering about at an airport bookshop last week, I came across the book The Kindness of Strangers by Michael McCullough and found myself engrossed in McCullough’s explanation of how humankind as a species come to care and do for those outside our familial circles despite our biological wiring and motivations to do otherwise.
McCullough walked through the different historical milestones in human civilisations that contributed to what looks like a gradual cultural movement towards kindness and altruism. He argued that “kindness is as bred in our bones as our anger or our lust or our grief or as our desire for revenge”.
As a species, we are social animals and the constant interactions with other human beings, many of whom are strangers, give us the opportunity to extend kindness and explore the feelings of giving or receiving kindness. Our evolution and survival depends on kindness and friendliness. I wonder if the theory of “survival of the fittest” should be understood as “survival of the kindest and friendliest” as these are the driving force behind most things that we have achieved. I am sure you will be able to think of numerous examples to illustrate this point!
However, to me, kindness is not just about extending a specific act to make another person happy. To me, kindness is multi-faceted. It covers our care for others, the world around us, self-care (are we all good at caring for ourselves?), encouraging and motivating others around us to be their best. In many scenarios, kindness is about saying something, not measuring someone by their weaknesses or their perceived weaknesses. My favourite form of kindness is setting boundaries although it might not feel like kindness for the recipient at the time. I guess that my grown-up children can now look back and smile at my obsession with setting boundaries but I hope that they found the boundaries useful and that they made them feel secure and taught them right from wrong.
For the Kindness Day on 13 November, I do hope to see the many kindness acts that Invicta will extend to one another, to our community, to the world around us, and most importantly, to ourselves.
Happy Kindness Day.
