Sharon Salzberg - The Force of Kindness: Change Your Life with Love and Compassion

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Kindness is compassion in action. It is a way of taking the vital human emotions of empathy or sympathy and channeling those emotions into a real-life confrontation with ruthlessness, abandonment, thoughtlessness, lonelinessall the myriad ways, every single day, we find ourselves suffering or witnessing suffering in others.

Yet growing up I had the impression that a kind heart ranked awfully low in cultural desirability, well after a sound head, a sharp wit, invulnerability, power over others, a fine sense of irony, and countless other qualities. The hero I saw displayed in the movies was fiercely resolute; the sidekick, trailing after the hero, picking up the pieces, might have been kind. The overwhelmingly popular girl on TV was striking, imposing, amusing; the second banana was usually kind and a lot less magnetic or interesting.

Today as well, when we think of adventure, going out on a limb, being bold, or being on the edge, it is rarely in the direction of caring, of compassion. Usually we externalize our sense of adventure and think of climbing mountains or jumping out of airplanes. Our idea of taking a risk is to be more ambitious, maybe more competitive. To be bold translates as being more hard-bitten and not noticing the consequence of our actions on others. To be brave has no gentleness or sensitivity associated with it.

On the face of it, kindness can seem wimpy, a cop-out, an excuse to do just a little bit to try to make a difference when so very much needs to be done. We might see kindness as the rationale for feeling good after speaking nicely to a homeless person we meet on the street, without having to consider basic injustice and what steps have to be taken to help that person and others like him or her to not suffer anymore. We might delegate kindness to the category of a quaint, old-fashioned virtuenot very effective, and certainly not very powerful. We might disdain kindness as a way of promoting separation and a hierarchy of distinctions: I, who am superior and untouched by your problem, will help you, who are inferior and in a bad way. We might dismiss kindness as the last, frail stand of righteousnessthe lesser state we turn to in some

dismay when wisdom, clarity, incisiveness, and intense love all have seemed to fail us and we havent been able to make any substantial difference in someones life.

A commitment to kindness can be the thread that twines throughout our various successes, disappointments, delights, and traumas, making our lives seamless, giving us ballast in a world of change, a reservoir of heartfulness to infuse our choices, our relationships, and our reactions.

Many of us long for an underlying sense of meaning, something we can still believe in no matter what happens to us, a navigational force to pull all the disparate pieces of our lives together into some kind of whole. Perhaps we find ourselves feeling helpless when even a little too much of the unexpected occurs. Or we feel defenseless when we find we dont have control over a situation and cant fathom what might happen next, unsure of where to turn when we arent having the positive effect we want with a troubled family member or a friend. In any of these circumstances, and in so many more, we shut down. Then we go through the motions of our day, day after day, without much dynamism or spirit.

Many of us experience ourselves as fragmented, perhaps as confident and expressive when we are with our families but a completely different person when we are at work, frequently hesitant and unsure. Perhaps we take risks when we are with others but are timid when alone, or we are cozily comfortable when alone yet are painfully shy and withdrawn when with others. Or maybe we drift along with the tides of circumstance, going up and down, not knowing what we might really care about more than anything else, but thinking there must be