Our World Tuesday: Be Kind

I appreciate my daughter's photography teacher because she teaches her about what are sometimes called the "soft skills" of kindness, communication, compassion--which I understand to be the active, engaged version of empathy.  Once you feel what someone is going through, what are you doing about it?

Art teachers very often get the credit for teaching the soft skills.  And because those skills are soft, they are often dismissed as less important or unimportant. After all, what's kindness if you can't add?  What is kindness if you can't report the facts?

At this stage in my life, I think it's all about the soft stuff.  I don't give a damn about what you know or what you do if you can't be kind.  I want the art of you before I'll tangle with the science of you.

Without compassion, knowledge is nothing and that horrible less-than-nothing:  It is every decision we make without concern for how what we decide affects others.

It comes down to this:  Talk to me so that I might know who you are.  Be naked in  the vocabulary of kindness--the desire to be known by what we do for others because doing for others is only right--that I might know who you are.  Or are not.  We begin and end in kindness.  Everything else is fluff.