Surprising Kindness

Expect good things from yourself. It is why you are here, why you were born. You are on this earth to be a good person. To be the good person you need yourself to be to accomplish your personal life goals.

Step up.

Embrace yourself.

Embrace yourself completely, the good and the bad. It may sound strange, but when we accept and embrace what we judge to be bad or wrong or incomplete within ourselves, we become more.

With that knowledge we have the ability, should we so choose, to be surprisingly kind to ourselves. Not lenient. Not allowing ourselves to think or behave shabbily, but to be less harsh with ourselves.

How often do you do something and later think that whatever it was you thought or did wasn’t good enough? You weren’t good enough?

Well, try this notion on for size. What if, at the time, you did as well as your spiritual and emotional abilities made possible?

What if you are human? Humans — even those of us who want to think we must always be not just perfect, but pluperfect — have thoughts and behaviors ranging from outer space stellar to pretty darn sad.

Around family, friends and strangers we might find ourselves surprised when we do or say something not planned out in the most minute detail and it turned out well. Or even better than that. It turned out to be fantastic. Brilliant. The right idea at the right time.

It turns out more frequently than we expect that we are the person we most aided. Yes, another person may have gotten something out of what we said or did. But our act of doing something useful initiated a thought or action which improves who we are.

Now.

In the present.

The person you are at this very moment. The man or woman you can become in the next millisecond. The person you have become since that moment in time.

Life is rough and we are rough on ourselves when we incorrectly presume that we continually bumble our way through life. We harshly feel that others are doing life right.

We are doing life wrong while they’ve got this thing down. They have the looks, the clothes, the manners and the money we falsely pretend we need to be the right person.

I went to high school with many guys and gals who absolutely came from the right side of the tracks. They lived in the right mansions on the right lake. There were several lakes, but only one was the “right” lake. They and their parents were trust fund babies. I mistook what they owned — the clothes, the cars and all the rest of it — for what made a person the right kind of person.

One thing that I never overlooked, in spite of my teenage silliness, was how much I loved hanging around those guys and gals. I loved being around them because they were kind. I knew the intense pressures they were under from their parents because they told me. In spite of all of my flaws, my being the new kid in town and living in a farmhouse, they were great.

The trust fund kids I most remember are the ones who exhibited surprising kindness.

That was their gift to me. I could pay for my own drinks and candy bars when we hung around the school vending machines, but there was no vending machine for human decency.

That is a gift.

Lucky man that I am, men and women of great kindness and decency have appeared at every juncture of my life.

Look around. Pay attention to who and what is around you. Yes, maybe there are some blighters. Humans who are blind to the good in life, to other humans alive with joy and joie de vivre, miss that.

Life might feel impossible some days and maybe even like we’re living in the middle of an eternal internal storm.

Imagine yourself differently. Imagine your life differently.

Look at your own ability to be kind to yourself.

Do it. Be kind to yourself.

Then expand that same kindness out into your world.