On Kindness

Esau and Jacob were twins and yet one was loved and the other, meh. When not even twins in a biblical patriarch’s household can attest to having the same parents and upbringing growing up, I believe it is safe to assert that people live different lives than us. They have different experiences and we can’t possibly claim to fully understand all that they think or do. It is not an understatement to say you never know what someone is going through. So we should maybe ease up on the judging.

Easier said than done, though.

One time my cousin asked me to help him solve a Maths problem. This was lower level Maths so I helped him. I explained the steps and he kept understanding it, so I exclaimed: You already know it, why did you ask me?! My sister smacked me on the metaphorical head and snapped: You explained it to him and that’s how he understood it; he didn’t come to you having already understood it! I laughed because I felt stupid; once she said it out loud, it made sense.

It was basically a case of having all the numbers but not knowing how to add them up. A lesson I am still learning today, by the way. Sometimes you know all the variants to a situation and yet you just never put them together until it is too late. Or until God intervenes and pulls you out in a lowkey dramatic cowboy swerve. That’s when you think: hey, prayer works!

Another story for another time.

I understand how much my position of privilege has defined me, but I do not want to be limited by it. I want to be more, never less. I want to be kinder, nicer, more empathetic and wiser – a list of challenges that always feel Sisyphean because I seem to be very bad at it.

Sometimes I don’t know if I even try.

I think what I want as my default is to remember that people are different from me. They did not have parents, for example, who did not seem to think that learning to be independent was gendered as many parents seem to think. Yes, I missed out on many things many young ladies learnt from their homes but they also missed out on what I had. Who is to say who got it better or worse? Not me, for sure.

I want to remember that I cannot judge people from my own life experience. Of course, I shall judge them mercilessly and sometimes callously with my best friends but that should not bleed into Life Outside Of Idle Gossip. Very hard to remember to do, but this much I am trying.

I sign off this time with these words from Doctor Who: without hope, without witness, without reward, be kind.