Kindness and a happy life

Thank you Shelflife and everyone who has shared stories of kindness. It would be inspiring if people tried a kind of experiment and aimed to do acts of kindness which they might otherwise not have thought of, and then shared with us what they did and how it felt. It could be on any scale - a smile at a stranger, or remaking contact with someone they care about but have lost touch with, or 'out of the blue' telling someone how much they value and care about them. I have read about people writing a letter to someone they value and who has made a positive difference to them, and then going to see them and reading them the letter. People weep good tears and it is full of meaning. Or.........something else. If anyone takes up this idea, please tell us about it.

I’ve always taught my children to be kind and I was happy to hear from my (then 16 year old) son, that he had bought a sandwich for a homeless man near his college. As they sat side by side on a wall, the man took a bite of the sandwich and then offered it to my son, who took one look at the black fingernails and politely declined .
Luckily this didn’t put him off being kind!

JaneJudge thank you and I agree that most people want to be really heard and understood. Listening is a gift of kindness.

This is such a lovely thread. True kindness is so unselfish.

I remember during a trip to Madeira several years ago and I was crossing the road when I had a vertigo attack and fell down my DH was trying to help me up when a young man came and stopped the traffic before helping me to his home so I could sit down and recover. We went back the next day with some flowers and chocolates as a thank you, he was most surprised we wanted to show our appreciation for all he did to help us. He most certainly didn’t expect anything in return.

I'm not sure if kindness comes naturally to me but I do acts of kindness and don't worry about feelings.

I remember the kindness of a hospital midwife when our first daughter was born. Her name was the same as mine and she was Black. She was also a Christian. The birth had been traumatic as the baby had the cord round her neck. It was a forceps delivery with epidural, episotomy, stitches, the works.

Everyone was very concerned about the baby but this midwife was the one who I asked if I was all right. When she found how bruised and battered I was, she brought me a rubber ring to sit on, ice to apply and painkillers. I have never forgotten her.

Love this post
Thank you

What a lovely thread
I've been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of many acts of kindness.
We hear so many bad things, but I think kindness wins. There are so many kind people around.

Not long ago, outside the town centre Sainsbury's, a young woman was carrying two heavy bags of groceries when one of the bags split and spilled groceries all over the ground. I gave her one of my big shopping bags and helped her pick everything up. It was a tiny thing to do, but she was grateful.

Something my grand daughter said this weekend made my heart swell so much I thought it would burst! She had brought her gorgeous 1 year old son to visit and I said “ I wonder what he will be when he grows up.?” And she said “I just want him to be a kind person”!!! I feel very confident he will be!

Gingster

I love the Charley Mackesy book The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse.
When the mole asks the boy what he would like to be when he grows up, he replies ‘I want to be kind’. How lovely is that! 💗

I loved reading this book - calming and beautiful, and the illustrations are so simple. The Dalai Lama has it right 'Be kind - it is always possible to be kind'...and so it is.

I am thousands of miles away from home at the moment, and strangers stop to smile and talk to me, so I feel at home anyway. Small kindnesses in a friendly community which mean a lot.

I don’t understand people who are not kind it costs nothing.

I am eternally grateful to and I bitterly regret that I cannot tell her so, the woman who helped me when I fell over in the street and was unable to get up.

Although she had a small child in the back of her car, she took the time to ring for an ambulance and to ring my daughter and wait until my daughter arrived.

Although this was 14 years ago, I still remember her kindness.

Indigo8 maybe the woman who helped you is able to read this! Or at least others who have done such acts of kindness for strangers may be reading it.

I try and be kind every day.

I’ve said this story before on another post but my 19 yo DS had a trial as a chef at The Dorchester in London. Before arrival he looked at the menu, lunch with one of the wine pairings came to £710 which actually made him feel sick. He said with the right set up, including gas and electricity costs, for £710 you could provide 711 people with balanced 1000calorie meals. When he arrived at the hotel there was £4 million worth of cars parked on the foyer and it just made him feel ill. 200 metres away he walked past 4 homeless men living in the same subway tunnel, and he said that even if he had got the job there, it just would have made him very angry. So he walked straight past the Dorchester, went back home and made sandwiches for the homeless and handed them out that day.

I think and hope that I'm a kind person - I certainly try to be as thoughtful and caring as possible and as Cossy said further up-post, I've always tried to "pay it forward".

The smallest acts of kindness bring me to tears. A few years ago my darling DH was in hospital (again) for quite a long stretch; the bulb in the wall light on my side of the bed exploded and I couldn't get the remains of it out. I phoned a randomly chosen local electrician, explained the problem and he said that as he was on his way to another job not far from my home, he would call in and see if he could sort it, which he did quite quickly (needle-nose pliers was apparently what I needed!).

I asked how much I owed him, and he wouldn't take any payment. I tried to insist, saying well at least take £20 and buy your wife some flowers, but he still wouldn't accept. I started to cry, and he gave me a big hug ... I'll never forget that, and I like to think that I was being paid back for some little kindness that I've done in the past. Fanciful maybe, but I find it a comforting thought.

Remember the Terrible Twos? My firstborn son went through a stage of terrible tantrums. Years ago now, he had a huge tantrum in a busy shopping centre, screaming as loud as possible and writhing on the ground. From experience I knew I just had to wait for him to finish. Any intervention only prolonged the episode. You can imagine the comments from passersby! I was heavily pregnant, sitting on a bench and a young woman came along and said, "I had one like that, so embarrassing isn't it? I'll stay with you until he's done". I was So Grateful.

Amazingly, I can remember a similar episode as the one CocoPops describes! It's so good not to judge but to understand with kindness

It’s interesting that the children’s “Word of the Year” for 2025, chosen by youngsters between 6 and 14, is “*kindness*”!