David R Hamilton, Ph.D– I hope you’ve had a nice start to the year. I’ve been reflecting a lot about kindness because my new book is all about kindness and I’ve been working on it for all of the second half of last year. It comes out in the summer.

One of the points I made in the book is that kindness lifts us out of ourselves. In the moment that we shift our attention onto the immediate needs of another person, however small these needs might seem or be, our attention shifts away from our own pain or problems.

A short while ago, as I walked along a street with a lot going on in my mind about a lot of things, I found an elderly man lying on the pavement. The situation immediately snapped me out of my head.

I helped him up. Was he OK? What had happened?

He’d fallen at the top of a small flight of stairs that led up to the street. He was OK. He dusted himself off, thanked me, and then popped into a shop. That was that.

But the situation snapped me out of my head and into my heart. Suddenly some of the issues I was dealing with didn’t seem quite so important after all, or at least I realized they weren’t quite what I thought they were. My perspective shifted.

Kindness does this. It somehow helps us see life more clearly.

I suppose the moral of the story is that sometimes when you need to see things a little more clearly in your life, go help someone.

And as your kindness helps that person, it also helps you. Maybe that’s nature’s reward.

SF Source David R Hamilton Jan 2024