resting from kindness.

I told myself once upon a time, that I never want to regret not extending myself in loving kindness when the opportunity arose. Yet as the years have passed, and my relationships transformed through their various stages of trust, I’ve learnt to let go of the idea that I need to constantly be present in the spaces I (once) filled. My heart has its limits, and the more I grow comfortable with it, the more I learn to not push it past its breaking point.

As someone who lives with their heart on their sleeve, more times than not, I spend equal time scraping it off the floor as I do pushing the creative boundaries on what it means to be kind. Healthy relationships have never truly been modelled well in my family, with the trauma of war, poverty and loss running deep across the generations. Stepping outside those bounds, I’ve learnt (often painfully so) to strike a balance between my own issues in dependency, and courage to consistently remain in vulnerability with community.

To say that I’ve been bruised by the nature of mistrust would be an understatement. Yet I find that so much of our perceived reality stems from the nature that we need to limit the hurting, when in fact the hurting has taught me ways in which to honour and reflect kindness more. We naturally forget that kindness can be perceived as threatening to a heart that has not learnt how to receive it, and especially so for one that has learnt of its existence with strings attached. I have leant from experience to step out from kindness not necessarily because I want to, but because perhaps the act of being kind was constructed into something it was never meant to be, an expectation and perception of more that did not exist. Someone’s reaction to our kindness is something we can never take personally, for when we do it, becomes less about kindness, and about ourselves, and our attributed value to kindness.

Choosing to engage in kindness tends to come at a cost, even if initially it doesn’t appear so. The hardest thing in kindness is choosing to do so consistently; to show up when and as is required. Yet, the paradoxical nature of it, is that we can never be there every time, all the time. Kindness is a learned team sport. The best and most sustainable forms of being present come from choosing to tag-team your way through your spaces, and knowing the own bounds of your heart. To be supportive requires us to be supporting, and to play a supporting role. The greatest lesson I’ve learnt is knowing my own limits in kindness, and learning to pass the baton forward when either I reach my own capacity, or when kindness cannot be received. Healthy boundaries ensure that kindness continues to endure. The more we learn to be kind to ourselves in the process of being kind to others, the more that capacity to be kind, grows.