'Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're
already in heaven now,' Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter to
his first wife turned lifelong friend. 'Kindness, kindness, kindness,'
Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year's Day in 1972. Half a
century later, the Dalai Lama placed a single exhortation at the center
of his ethical and ecological philosophy: 'Be kind whenever possible. It
is always possible.' Nothing broadens the soul more than the touch of
kindness, given or received, and nothing shrivels it more than a flinch
of unkindness, given or received -- something we have all been
occasionally lashed with, and something of which we are all occasionally
culpable, no matter how ethical our lives and how well-intentioned our
conduct. Everyone loves the idea of kindness -- loves thinking of
themselves as a kind person but somehow, the practice of it, the
dailiness of it, has receded into the background... Maria Popova shares
more in this post.
