Kindness is About YOUR Growth and Not About Benefiting Others
Why an act of kindness should be treated as an experience that has most power to transform our own lives. Not merely touch the lives of others.
We are grateful to Aesop for having said it for all of us, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Yes, I get it. It does a lot of good. And no amount of kindness is ever enough. But our default conclusion is that it does a lot of good only to others. Not so much to us. But the truth may be different. If an act of kindness does not kindle your heart and make a change in you, however tiny, it may be a less fruitful experience.
How an Act of Kindness Should Translate to Change Your Own Situation
If you convince yourself that an act of kindness is doing more good to you than to others, you will stay motivated. Guaranteed. You will grow and evolve. Faster. And you will know you do. You will start hating your boss less, envying your neighbour’s Mercedes no more and look at your friend’s beautiful wife more as a non-biological ‘sister’, than you did ever before. You will also pay more attention to your aging parents and call them more frequently. They deserve it as much as the old men and women you help in an Old Age Home to add brownie points to your list of random acts of kindness that you can boast of. You will pay more attention to your own health and not bury doctor’s advice under the weight of your habits fossilized by your ego. You will become flexible. You will no longer give an ego-filled twist to your own negativity, ‘Oh! How can I not eat what I eat’? ‘I deserve better than that’. ‘I am who I am’. ‘Everybody is different, right?’ Etc. Your subconscious mind will sabotage you less. You will start questioning it at the conscious level and do better. You will be kind to yourself first. You will cherish more moments of happiness in life and each moment will last longer.
It is About Shift in Emphasis and Enhanced Awareness
My perception about kindness became finer when I read “The Book of Kindness” by Om Swami. The book is a guide on how kindness can be cultivated and practised to transform lives, starting with our own. Through his inspiring experiences and conversations with people, anecdotes from different writers and scriptures and heavy dozes of light…
