Kindness
You know it when you experience it or witness it. It can be faked or used to manipulate, but not for long. Kindness can be as subtle as easing the load of common and difficult human interactions. It’s helping a stranger who needs it. It can be dropping a note to a friend in need, acknowledging someone’s grief. Listening can be all the kindness someone may need.
Kindness can also have profound consequences: saving someone from bankruptcy or helping another find a job during difficult times.
Kind people usually don’t have to spend time preparing gifts of kindness. It flows out of them, no matter what the season.
It’s an expression of who and what they are.
Awareness
People who are aware of their wants and needs and dreams and desires and who are aware of the degree of impact their lives have on others are comfortable to be with. This comfort, born of self-awareness, is a gift to others in itself, an all-season thing that also cannot be wrapped on unwrapped.
This one is more difficult to fake.
When you are with an aware person he or she accepts you as you are and you experience no pressure to give anything in return. Their self-acceptance lets you off the hook. They spend no effort trying to change you or coerce you or make you “fit” because they are not trying to doing any of those things to themselves. What a gift!
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