When Kindness Hits You Like a Ton of Bricks, Build a Home

How do you take your kindness?  Do you like a simple signpost surrounded by a tranquil blanket of snow, or… (scroll to the end of the article for more)

During a rare outing my daughter and I headed to a local store to buy some makeup.  Weird, as makeup seems a relic of another time and place, not one in which she is being homeschooled and wears a mask over half her face whenever we leave the house.  But we went anyway, needing any reason at all to break the monotony of being homebound.

Excited about our purchases and even more thrilled to be engaging with the real world, we were startled by the older man entering the store as we emerged into the cold, sunny day.  Even more startling was that the gentleman was wearing a mask that advertised his support for the other Presidential candidate.  Meaning, the one I didn’t vote for.  Meaning, the one my daughter doesn’t follow on Instagram and couldn’t even if she wanted to.

I think my heart skipped a beat.  For one thing, facial coverings like his are uncommon in our community.  And for another, January 6 was just a few days prior and I was still rattled by the scene that unfolded that day at our nation’s capitol.

Then something happened.

The man with the other-guy’s-mask paused, stepped aside and gestured for my daughter and me to pass.  I gave (what I hoped was) a calm and sincere thank you, and we walked out of the store.

We see the lawn banners and the bumper stickers and the memes reminding us to “Just Be Kind.”  But what does it actually mean to be kind?  And how does kindness fit in with other important values like honesty and compassion and self-respect?  In this “us versus them” world the power of kindness is needed to heal and reunite.  So how can we best use kindness to accomplish that?  Over the next couple of months I will present The Kindness Series, a post every couple of weeks, covering a topic related to kindness: what it means and how it pairs with other personality traits like honesty and compassion.  How we can use kindness to garner trust.  And who knows what else.  I’m following my masked nose with this one and hope you will join me for a socially-distanced journey.

But back to the guy with the other mask.  I still feel guilty about my (hopefully) internalized initial reaction to him:  suspicion and dislike.   But he surprised me by being polite and decent.  He could have been a jerk because he’s in the minority in our community with his political leanings and assumed (correctly) we were on the opposing side.  But he didn’t.

He was kind.

And my daughter and I responded…in kind.

She and I talked about this small yet significant encounter as we drove home.  It’s easy to make assumptions in this age where emotions run high at every turn, but if we are going to lower the temperature on anger, judgement and fear, we need cast aside what we think we know and express, even in little ways, a bit of kindness.