The Kindness We Deserve

It baffles my mind, truly confounds me, that we aren’t kinder to each other. Why?

Kindness should ooze from our pores. The pain all of us will have to endure while we work our way through this beautiful and odd gift of life is immense. None of us will be unscathed or unscarred. We will all lose precious things. We will all face insurmountable expectations and collapse under the weight.

Without realizing it, we will build entire lives on foundations that will eventually crumble beneath us. At least once in each of our lives, if not many more times, we will go to set foot somewhere that was once steady and reliable, and instead of touching solid ground we will find ourselves falling through an unknown abyss. And it will shake us to our core. And it will hurt. Oh God, it will hurt. And it will f*ck us up. And through no fault of our own, some of us will not rebound well from this.

I ask this of you, I ask this of myself — how can we not all see the profound respect we all deserve in merely existing? How is it that we don’t look at each and every one of ourselves and say, “I see you soldier. I see you saint. I too am traveling this unreliable territory and I will share with you what I have seen if you will share your sight with me. And together we just might make it to higher ground where we can survey this cruel and beautiful land.”?

It should be a given that when your time of pain comes, you should see kind faces at every turn.

And once you have regained some solid footing and found some higher ground, it should seem obvious that the thing to do is to reach for others and assist.

There is no one, no fellow traveler, that does not deserve kindness.

Truly it astounds me that we are not kinder to each other.