JUST KINDNESS

[Guest guest]

JUST KINDNESS --

 

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the

most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving

much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our

pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend

who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who

can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can

tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the

reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares," wrote

Henri Nouwen in *Out of Solitude.*

 

Years ago from a college classmate, I heard a Persian proverb, "With

a sweet tongue of kindness, you can drag an elephant by a hair."

 

"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt,

kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to

evaporate," wrote Albert Schweitzer. "He who sows courtesy reaps

friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love," wrote the Greek

religious leader, Saint Basil.

 

Kindness is often unspoken. "An eye can threaten like a loaded and

leveled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its

altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for

joy," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. At another time, Emerson wrote, "You

cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be

too late."

 

"You may be sorry that you spoke, sorry you stayed or went, sorry you

won or lost, sorry so much was spent. But as you go through life,

you'll find -- you're never sorry you were kind," said Herbert

Prochnow.

 

"Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this

is the beginning of wisdom," wrote Theodore Isaac Rubin in "One to

One."

 

"Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little

things, in which smiles and kindness and small obligations win and

preserve the heart, said English chemist Humphrey Davy.

 

"We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in

filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop that makes it

run over. So in a series of kindness there is, at last, one which

makes the heart run over," once wrote the Scottish lawyer and

biographer, James Boswell.

 

"We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or

because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many

kindnesses, because of luck . . . But part of it has got to be

forgiveness and gratefulness," wrote columnist Ellen Goodman.

>From an artist's perspective, ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov once

said, "The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving

pleasure."

 

SPEND YOUR DAY FILLED WITH KINDNESS