Kindness and Gratitude: The Two Sides of an Inspirational Coin
I’ve realised that it’s kind of trendy to express gratitude and kindness. Which is amazing! The more kindness and gratitude the better we all ought to live. But are we truly becoming more kind to one another?
I like to think of kindness as selfless act to the pure benefit of someone else. This doesn’t mean being the nicest person you can possibly be. Being nice and doing nice things to others is absolutely great, but it may imply an act of self-preservation. This means that by being nice to others, they’re more likely to like us, to empathise with us and even perhaps doing something nice in return. Like bringing coffee to our peers in the office. We won’t do it every single day for ever. If we bring coffee one day to everyone, next time they get a coffee on the way to the office, it’d be nice of them to bring one for us. However, being nice to someone who got the promotion we’ve been working so hard for requires will power. We either get mad, anger, frustrated and pissed off or we genuinely congratulate the person because it was the right (nice) thing to do.
On the other hand, kindness is more of a lifestyle or a state of being. We practice it with genuine intention of making someone else happy or stopping someone else’s suffering without any regard to ourselves. When we open/hold the door to someone full of grocery bags, we don’t think about how this person can and will pay us back. When we go out of our way to help a tourist to find his way, we definitely don’t get to the office excited and start bragging about how kind we were to have gone out of our way to help a tourist in the neighbourhood. We don’t even think about a payback or to bring it up to make ourselves feel good because those were acts of kindness.
When we are kind to others, most of the time we don’t even realise what we’ve done. However, finding ourselves on the other end of an act of kindness, we can’t help but feel grateful. Gratitude is an emotion, a chemical reaction, our body experiences when something was done onto us, we’ve received something. Thus, feeling grateful changes our state which in turn inspires us to act with kindness when opportunities arise. Feeling gratitude implies not needing anything in return, we’re not feeling lack or separation.
We can then conclude that kindness and gratitude are the two sides of the same coin. “Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received” which inspires an inward desire to act with kindness.
Quote by Henry van Dyke
