Conscious Choice: Add Kindness to the Day’s To-Do List

December 2005 | Body & Mind Health

Add Kindness to the Day’s To-Do List

By Julia Mossbridge

‘We have the power through acts of love or lovelessness literally to create one another,” wrote Beverly Harrison, a retired professor of theology formerly at Union Theological Seminary (Making the Connections, Beacon Press, 1985). A longtime friend copied this quote for me years ago, and in recent months I kept it posted in my kitchen near my list of things to do, as if kindness could be neatly checked off like “re-seat toilet” or “write December column.”

A few weeks ago, kindness was only one of the items on my list. The biggest to-do’s were getting clarity on my career and love life. Each morning I’d write in my journal, “I still don’t get it. Where am I going? And with whom?” Months passed this way. Then I hit upon an idea: road trip! When I left for Michigan, I wasn’t sure how it would all come together, but I was full of faith that it would. I intended to get clarity and made space to receive it. I wasn’t disappointed.

But that weekend while visiting my friend Helen, I also got a much larger gift that I wasn’t intending to receive. I spent all of Saturday wandering around Ann Arbor, noticing what I noticed, learning what I learned, finishing the afternoon with a nap that included a beautiful, clarifying dream.

I regaled Helen with the serendipitous happenings and meaningful moments I had experienced that day. Feeling the excitement and wanting to share her own experiences, she told me about a meditation practice that had brought up some sadness, bringing tears to her eyes only a few minutes before.

Sitting on a couch in the soft light of her living room, I could have listened to her story with love and compassion. Instead, I was aware of a swift shift from excitement to anger. Acting from anger that arose from my own sadness and not from any concern or compassion for Helen, I turned to her and blamed her for the very grief she’d been vulnerable enough to share with me.

Helen’s reaction was as generous as I expected it would be, but I knew I had hurt her. I’d lost her trust. I left on Sunday after making too many apologies, wondering how I could have committed an act of love, not clumsy lovelessness.

On the way home, even though I didn’t feel like speaking with anyone, I made myself pull into the driveway of my friend Rebecca’s home in rural Indiana. Rebecca told me about having a conversation with her love, Max, who said kindness is the foundation for a good relationship, to which Rebecca responded rather flippantly: “Do you really think a relationship can be founded on kindness alone?” The way Rebecca told the story, you could feel Max’s sense of disappointment at her response, and this made her look twice at her assumptions.

Rebecca thought about her intellect, creativity, and imagination. She thought of justice, beauty, truth, and every other important virtue that she had imagined must be included in the foundation of a good relationship. She couldn’t imagine that they could be abandoned for kindness alone.

Then, she could see two roads ahead of her. If she took one, she knew she would continue using kindness as a spice to throw into the mix of her life, not understanding its true power.

But if she took the other, kindness would be the ground on which she walked. Kindness would be her life. She made a choice to take the new path: the one carved out of kindness.

Inspired by Rebecca’s story, I thought about how I could have handled the situation with Helen. If I could have given myself the kindness of self-reflection, I could have given my friend the kindness that she deserved.

Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work.”

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