Be kind.
Two simple words. Profound in their simplicity.
I have been thinking about kindness a lot lately. The sharp edges of a world where fast fashion and fast fascism are imploding is not a space where kindness abounds. Kindness is on its knees begging at your feet, but I don’t see her. I’m too angry to care. There is yelling. Finger-pointing. Blame. Anger. Violence. Coercion. Alienation. Othering.
Can something as simple as kindness be a solution to the anger and hate that seems to be infecting our private and public spaces? Making us anxious, depressed and hopeless. Will it stop us hoarding wealth? Stop us killing each other? Stop us taking what is not ours? Stop us taking the last tree? Does the giving and receiving of kindness change who we are? How we live? And the choices that we make?
I googled kindness.
As suspected, it is the quality of friendliness. Being considerate and generous via voluntary acts for the benefit of others without reward. It’s a genuine desire to improve another person’s wellbeing. Kindness involves mercy. Decency. Forgiveness. It involves seeing the pain or discomfort of others and not seeing it as separate to you, but part of something you can change. Sometimes not with solutions, but with presence. Learning kindness that stands beside and reaches across is different to the kindness I learnt as a child which reaches down.
I have always felt the pain of others. I thought everyone did. That sadness in someone’s eyes, the despair of slumped shoulders, the voice cracking on a word, has always reached deep inside to my humanity. Some days I can’t unsee it. The woman sleeping on the street outside a city department store, the boy who came out of his car window in front of me on the highway and took his life, the koala-forest tagged for logging. It hurts. Yet none of that has anything to do with me. Or does it?
That stir, that call to action, to witness, to listen, to hold presence, is my experience of spirituality. It’s painful to feel the pain of others. But I remind myself it is more painful to be in that pain. Kindness is about bearing witness. It’s about courage. And it’s about fragility. And it’s about action.
I find myself drawn into the binary, using my moral compass to trace the lines that contain my values. I too rage at those on the outside of those lines, and I feel the moral rot. The spiritual decomposition that comes with hate. Even when I’m certain I’m right. Hate is a contagion. A virus that is more deadly than any pandemic. And kindness. Well, it occurred to me, that it’s the cure. Not ideology. Not leaders. Not money. But kindness. Kindness is our camel in the moral desert. And capitalism, this illusionary place of plenty, is the desert.
There are four pillars of kindness. Kindness to others, to self, to animals and to the earth. It’s the most deeply sensible foundation for living. To care for self, for those you love, for broader community, to protect and care for your environment is the foundation of most religions. Yet those who espouse the wisdom from their holy books seem so far removed from the kindness on those pages.
Sometimes it’s hard to be kind. People can be revolting. But sometimes, as hard as it is, I remind myself that it is them who need kindness most of all.
So kill them, not with guns, or bombs or nukes. But, with kindness.
Radical kindness.
Mandy Nolan’s column has appeared in The Echo for almost 25 years. She is a writer, comedian and artist, and was the Greens cadidate at the past two elections.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
