Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Year-End Reflections on Kindness

"The practice of kindness is the daily, friendly, homely caring form of love.  It is both humble a schoolboy bringing his teacher a bouquet of dandelions and exalted a fireman giving his life to save someone else's.  Kindness is love with hands and hearts and minds.  It is both whimsical  causing our faces to crack into a smile and deeply touching causing our eyes to shimmer with tears.  And its miraculous nature is such that the more acts of kindness we offer, the more of them we have to give, for acts of kindness are always drawn from the endless well of love."
Dawna Markova

As I look back on 2013 from the kindness perspective, there are a couple of things that stand out.  One is that kindness LASTS.  Many times, it is remembered long after it is over.

On Christmas Day, I ran into a former secretary who worked with me more than two decades ago when I practiced law at a large, international firm.  I had not seen her in years and it was great for the two of us to see each other and to remember, even briefly, the many hours that we had spent together -- we worked hard and there was a lot of stress, but we laughed a lot, too.  One of the reasons that I enjoyed working with her was that in addition to being very smart, very funny and a hard worker, she was fiercely loyal.  On a December 19th more than 20 years ago, I was taken a well-earned and scheduled-in-advance day off to do Christmas shopping as I worked most every day, including weekends.  As I was on my way to the stores, my then secretary called me and said that even though it was my day off, some attorneys were looking for me to sign a document.  She said that she knew that I would be in casual clothes and would not want to walk into the office, but that if I drove by the office building, she would run down with the document so that I could sign it.  And that is what we did.  Her thoughtfulness and kindness have stayed with me all these years.

In addition to the amazingly long-lasting quality of kindness, it can be relatively simple and the opportunities to be kind abound.  Every day.

I am grateful for this journey in kindness and all the lessons that it continues to teach me.

Happy New Year!  Wishing you much kindness in 2014. 

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