What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. – George Saunders
This week in my classes, I talked about kindness and its relationship to mindfulness. The connection is both obvious and profound. Mindfulness is about noticing and observing, without deciding if it’s good or bad in that moment. The first step in kindness is noticing too. Notice how a person really looks – their facial expression, their body stance – and you are using mindfulness. Listen to their words and how they are saying them. Once you truly ‘see’ that person, kindness often comes as a natural consequence. When I asked the classrooms when mindfulness could help with kindness, even the Kindergarteners had good suggestions. One girl said that if you noticed someone looking lonely on the playground, you could ask them if they wanted to play. It’s not rocket science. The biggest barrier is choosing to notice. Practicing mindfulness increases our capacity to notice. After a while it becomes hard to not notice. And once you truly notice, it becomes hard not to be kind.
George Saunders, an acclaimed writer of short stories and essays, delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, largely on the value of kindness to our own lives and society as a whole. Interestingly, a pivotal story he tells is about one of his major regrets in life, choosing not to notice a girl in 7th grade to whom he could have been kind. The speech was widely circulated at the time (though I only just saw it now as he’s publishing a book centered around it, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness