Kindness

Over the last few years much has been written and many exercises carried out to help us discover, assess and enhance our personal levels of kindness. Sussex University has just embarked on a comprehensive project to find out how we feel about kindness (“The Kindness Test”). What is kindness? Am I kind? Who am I kind to and how is my kindness expressed? What are the limits on my kindness? Do I think people are generally kind? Is kindness something valued by society and should it be? And so on.

We feel instinctively that acts of kindness are good for us, as well as the recipient; science gives us physical evidence that the kinder we are, the more our brain’s reward system encourages us to be kind, the better it is for our sense of happiness and self-worth.

So here is something to reflect on. Like “humility” in one of my earlier posts, the origin of the word “kindness”, used in the modern sense of “being kind to someone”, can give us a different perspective on current usage. The prehistoric root of “kind” is the word “gen-” which signified “giving birth”, with all its associations of creation and family, and from which many modern words in common use are derived. “Generic”, “generation” and “gentle” are obvious descendants of “gen-” and for a word with an origin more obviously connected with “kind”, think of “kin”, as in “kith and kin”.

Perhaps, therefore, awareness of this ancient word can encourage us to think of ourselves as members of the human family, all bound together by a common need to show kindness to each other.