A Counterprogramming Note: Choose Kindness

A small plea for grace in a season when we all need it

Photo by Ditto Bowo on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about kindness a lot lately. I’m a huge fan of it.

Partly because the world feels like it’s vibrating at a frequency only dogs and doomscrollers can hear. Partly because every time I turn on the news in the United States it feels like I’ve stumbled into some surreal, late-night reality show where the contestants are competing for Most Outrageous Human of the Week. And they’re all trying really hard. But mostly because life has been … a lot. For me, for my wife, for people close to us. Medical issues stacked on medical issues, the kind of stuff that hits at 3 a.m. when the house is dark and silent and you can’t sleep because your brain is doing laps.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to:

Nobody knows what anyone else is carrying.

We encounter people every day, in the grocery store, waiting on us at a restaurant, in line at the DMV, who are holding together whole collapsing worlds with duct tape and hope. And we have absolutely no clue. Because we’re all out here performing “I’m fine, thanks!” like it’s the national anthem.

It makes me think if we really understood how close most people are to the edge, we’d probably handle each other like we were all made of porcelain.

I’m not saying we need to turn into saints or walk around handing out free therapy shoulder squeezes. But what if we extended the benefit of the doubt just a little more often? What if we defaulted to kindness, even when we’re tired, or stressed, or grumpy, or in a hurry? What if, instead of assuming the worst, we paused long enough to consider that the person in front of us might be doing their absolute best?

Kindness costs nothing.

And I’m convinced that if we all made those tiny choices, we’d live in a slightly softer world. A world where people feel seen instead of judged. A world where none of us has to be perfect just to be treated decently.

Life is hard enough. We don’t need to make it harder for each other.

So here’s my little reminder, to myself as much as anyone else:

Be kind. Be gentle. You don’t know what storm someone else is weathering. And you might be the only calm moment they get today.