Sara and Melissa Talk About...Kindness

We've been running a column series to get more personal with our readers. We are now into our sixth year!

This month, we are talking about kindness. It feels especially important to talk about this topic during the holidays. 

We're always open to topic suggestions, so please don't hesitate to share those in the comments. We'd also love to know if you can relate to anything we've said or hear your own thoughts on the topic. So don't be shy. 😊 We look forward to getting to know you as much as we're letting you get to know us. You can find our previous columns here, in case you missed them.

Melissa Amster:

There are so many directions to go with the subject of kindness. I've recently been thinking of something because of an influencer I follow: @yourbestiemisha (or Dontcrossagayman on Facebook). Misha is always talking about the nice things he does for strangers. It's inspiring and heartwarming to hear about everything he does to make someone else's life a bit brighter. However, I know he's received pushback from people who think he's bragging about his acts of kindness. 

That's what I want to talk about today: Should we share about our acts of kindness with others? 

I personally like spreading kindness and doing nice things for people whenever I can. I just don't like to talk about it on social media. To me, it feels like robbing someone of their dignity. Especially if it's a charitable act of some kind. So I'm private about doing acts of kindness. What's important to me is that the recipient benefitted and that it made their life just a bit easier. 

On the other hand, hearing Misha talk about the things he does for people is inspiring others to do acts of kindness and spread more joy whenever possible. It brightens my day to hear about something good he did for someone else. With all the cruelty in the world these days, it's refreshing to hear about someone just paying for another person's groceries or comforting them when they are crying in public. I do feel that Misha only talks about his acts of kindness in order to inspire other people to do them too. He seems to be all about love and light. Still, that doesn't mean that I feel comfortable going public with every single act of kindness I've ever done. To each their own, right?

This holiday season, I task you with doing one act of kindness. I don't want to know what you did or who you did it for. I just want you to brighten someone else's day. And if you need some ideas for what to do, go visit Misha on social media!

Sara Steven:

I had a tougher time with the topic choice for this month, mainly due to the current climate of everything going on around us. There have been a lot of tragedies lately, intertwined with a lot of dispassionate people who wouldn’t seem to know an act of kindness if it was staring them in the face. 

And then I saw this news clip about a skunk who’d gotten stuck in a dumpster, and the first thing that had come to mind for me was: how metaphoric.

The last animal most of us would ever consider assisting would be a skunk. The risk of helping–I mean, that alone might make most of us take pause. I’ve never been sprayed by a skunk, but from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty awful. Yet the local fire department reached out to the Southwest Wildlife Conservation, all in an effort to try to do everything they could to save the skunk, despite getting sprayed multiple times for over an hour.  

Maybe they were merely doing their job. For me, though, it was an ultimate act of kindness.

Life can be like that when we dole out our own acts of kindness. Sometimes the interactions we have or the situations we face when we try to help or be kind are a lot like dealing with a skunk; caustic. Troublesome. Smelly. But we still dive in, because being kind isn’t about reaping the rewards. It’s about doing something for someone else, often without that reward. Sometimes it seems that the person who is the recipient of the act of kindness could care less. They don’t seem grateful. Instead of being grateful, they might lash out because they are going through something we don’t understand. Much like the skunk, it could be fear that drives their reaction. And all we can do is say that we tried.

It can get to a point where we might feel like it’s not worth it. We keep trying to be kind, but at what cost? Getting sprayed over and over, multiple times, doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. Being kind can change people, though. It can make a difference, even if we don’t see it. Even if the recipient doesn’t recognize it–they might later on, when they are facing their own situations, make a choice in doing something for someone else. Paying it forward.  

Watching the video reminded me that it isn’t always easy to be kind, but given the choice between being kind and being dispassionate, I choose kindness, every time. Even if it sometimes means having to take a long-awaited metaphorical bath in a tub of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap to get the smell off.   

What are your thoughts on kindness?

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