Kindness Creatures

I was reading FaceBook one day and noticed Mark Harris' post offering his home, his help, or his services to someone he knew who was asking for prayers for a family member at Mercy Hospital. This stuck me then as a generous act of kindness.

Kindness has been lurking just below the surface of my brain ever since. I kept wanting to blog about kindness but what do you say? It's kind to be kind? Not inspiring, informative or profound.

I reflected back on all the times I was a recipient of kindness; from Jane buying me lunch in high school to the stranger who drove me and my dying baby to the hospital. Or the stranger in Pendlelton Oregon who let me collapse in her living room while I was trying to overcome heat stroke. She had had a similar experience with heat once and recognized the signs. She brought me ice and orange juice and took care of Roger while I panted helplessly on the floor of her home for several hours. Or the time when something broke on my car and it was billowing thick black smoke and my friend Lynn followed me to the car repair shop so she could come between me and any other innocent driver who happened to find themselves in my noxious smoke.

Humans give; helping hands, a ride, coffee, loans, lunches; gifts of times, effort, sharing of, or reaching out. Kindness seems to bubble to the surface without thought. Some innate automatic response, part of the parasympathetic nervous system. Humans are kind. And the mathematics of kindness is dramatic. It is astounding that it doesn't matter if we are giving or receiving, the affects are the same.

Some things we can not do alone. At Maxine's wake the elderly Native gentlemen took the burden from the family so Josephine and Adam could bear their grief. Jane needing help in Kansas. My divorce. Claire's cancer.

Kindness might burble to the surface without any guidance from our conscious mind but then it needs action. Participation. As we groan under the weight of the human condition kindness needs love.

And another human being.