2000 Years of Kindness

“‘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.