Day Seven-- Where the Heart Is

It’s been one week since I started this 100 days of kindness project, and so I thought I would take a moment to reflect on how the week went. As far as my individual acts of kindness are concerned, some days were clearly more successful and effective than others.  However, one thing that became all too clear to me this week is that while isolated acts of kindness are good, they don’t necessarily make you a kinder person. It’s all too easy, for example, to perform an act of kindness, check it off your list for the day, and then go home and get angry at your spouse, or join an argument on Facebook, or get angry and shout obscenities while watching the news (maybe that last one is something that only happens in my house, I don’t know).  Furthermore, when it comes to the sort of transformative power that I believe kindness and compassion can have in our world, I think it’s far more important to cultivate loving-kindness in your heart, and to adopt a posture of kindness throughout your day, than to simply do random nice things for people and then call it a day.  True kindness, therefore, is not necessarily about what we do (though of course our actions are important), but rather about the kind of person that we choose to be.

With this in mind, for the second week of this experiment, I am going to focus more on cultivating a kinder heart than on individual acts of kindness.  In his book on kindness, psychologist Piero Ferrucci talks about a number of qualities, or virtues, that can aid us in becoming kinder versions of ourselves.  One of those qualities is patience, a virtue I have always struggled with mightily.  And so tomorrow, my focus will be on patience.  I’ll start the morning with a meditation on patience and hold the word as a centering mantra throughout the day. We’ll see if I can make it through a whole day without becoming impatient.  Anyone who knows me well knows that this will be a challenge for me. J