Kindness derives from the same word as kin or kindred. It means knowing the other as kin or as a kindred spirit. It means stepping beyond prejudice or judgement of any sort, seeing beyond all preferences and divisions, beyond exterior guises and disguises, acts and pretensions to the shining spirit informing anyone and everyone you think about, communicate with, become aware of, or encounter and deal with directly in person.

Seeing the myriad factors that connect us as interdependent beings informed by the same miracle of life and consciousness, rather than maintaining the delusion of separateness born of focusing exclusively on the factors that apparently divide us all into individuated, independent beings, seeing what connects us to another, rather than separates us from them and knowing that connection to be the source of the love our souls crave for, it is a natural consequence to feel the urge to treat others as kin and so act kindly towards them.

It’s not about being saintly or being nice. It’s merely about being aware that essentially we’re all family and the more we take care of each other, if even just by a quick smile of acknowledgment passing in the street, the more we allow our caring, nurturing, life-affirming energy to radiate to others as we go, the more everyone will feel safe and sound and the more safe and sound we all feel, the less likely we’ll be to behave destructively and foolishly on a collective level.

And while at times you may momentarily lose heart and wonder how your own relatively insignificant acts of kindness can ever transform an entire world, you are in fact extremely powerful and what you do has actual and profound impact on the whole.

Indeed, according to the Taoists, if just one of us ever manages to be completely and utterly healed, the whole world will instantaneously heal itself to match us.

Healing begins (and ends) with kindness.