How to Create More Kindness

Image by John Hain from Pixabay 

I think we can agree that the world today needs more kindness. The environment in our country is rather unkind, more than ever in the past. There are daily diatribes about something in the media and in conversations. More murders, school shootings, violence against religions, racism, etc. It pervades the news and social media.

How can we create more kindness? Humans tend to reflect what they see in others. So hate and fear spread very quickly. However. kindness is contagious, too. When we create kindness, others who see it feel more kind. It can spread as well. We need to evidence kindness in more ways and more places to spread it outward.

The critical ingredient in kindness is empathy. "Empathy's most important role . . . is to inspire kindness: our tendency to help each other, even at a cost to ourselves." [The War for Kindness, Building Empaty in a Fractured world" by Jamil Zaki, pg 4]

Empathy involves sharing, caring about, and thinking about the experience of others. In our hurry up and fast track lives we often fail to take the extra few seconds to interact with anyone on this level. We miss the richness of empathy in our lives because we tend to isolate ourselves from others at an emotional level. We have become too busy to care or even think about others. We lose so much by this.

With whom do you have empathy? How limited is the circle of contacts in your life with whom you share at a level of empathy?

Are you kind? How kind are you? How kind might you be today? Tomorrow? Let's start a kindness epidemic!