It is claimed that people don’t have time to spare anymore, nor are they willing to show their kindness and benevolence. They claim that in reality treating strangers with kindness is not a thing, it is more like an urban legend.
Indeed, the person next to us could be living their life’s biggest drama, and we just walk past them, without caring about what might have happened. It’s like looking at our fellow human beings, but not actually seeing through them. We ignore their sadness and teary eyes while running for our next errand. The dizzying speeds of life and our everyday problems leave no room to think about others. Each one of us has their own and their close friends and families’ business to attend to, and we act as if that’s more than enough. As if we’ve decided to offer our help only to those within the limits of our close environment, drawing the line beyond that.
In the meantime, there’s the logic of “since no stranger helps me, why should I help others?”. And we could say that there’s reasonable thinking beneath that. We’ve all been hurt, we’ve all lived through unpleasant attitudes coming from other people, and that’s how we selfishly and agoraphobically try to avoid endeavours with others. Kindness today is perceived as a weakness, and a naivety, forcing us to refrain from showing our goodness in fear of misunderstandings. We hide behind facades and formal norms of social behaviour, trying to convince ourselves that we don’t need to do more than what others would have done for us, thus creating a vicious circle from which we cannot escape.
Either way, this circle can break. Kindness coming from strangers exists, and it’s beautiful to rely on it. It might be in short supply, but it gets reproduced easily. Every little deed of kindness can become the starting point of a benevolence domino. Perhaps it functions according to the law of action-reaction, and it just needs someone to act first, provided there’s another person to unravel the yarn ball of good deeds.
It doesn’t really require great effort. We can all start from something small, something that will make a stranger smile. In a world where chaos, hunger, poverty, war and all sorts of interests are promoted, kindness is a beauty within the horror, a flower between thorns. Helping the “stranger” in front of you does not make you weak, it makes you human, a human that acknowledges empathy and not selfishness. I don’t think I need to tell you what you will gain, just trying will be enough. Because if we think about it, there really are no selfless deeds; the truth is that you will gain something too. What that will be is for you to realize…