Some words are easier to use than explain. Kindness is one of them. I recognize an act of kindness when I am the recipient of one, but trying to explain it has been difficult. It is not so much what someone has done that makes it feel like kindness, but the context in which it happens. For example, when I was still able to drive and had my own car, friends would swing by and pick me up so we could go do something together, I never thought twice about them doing that. It was just something we did for each other. Now that I can no longer drive and I have lost my paratransit services, when my friends offer to come take me and my manual wheelchair so I can go somewhere with them, I experience the effects of their act of kindness. In a poem called Kindness by Naomi Shihah Nye,[1] she explains that kindness is an inherent part of who we are. We become kind and gain an understanding of kindness when we understand what it is to have been in that space of deep sorrow and loss.

[1] Nye, Naomi Shihah (1995). Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Portland, OR: Far Corner Books.