Kindness - Pretty, or a Pity?

[Dimmesdale]

Kindness as a human emotion all too often sits in the bowels of people. That is, in their more tender emotional parts, which are usually far too sensitive and hence, frail.

If I extend kindness to someone as a firm olive branch of vouchsafed hope, that must imply something first of all that is Firm in me. If I extend the same branch in a feeble, struggling, and shaking aspect, then that sheds darkness on the very act of kindness. It leads in short order to a questioning of the value of the gesture from which it can hardly recover.

Kindness, if it comes from a place of solidity (and therefore, of real sincerity and assuredness) is most welcome and auspicious. On the other hand, if kindness comes as a result of flattery, then that same kindness is a mark against trust, against well-being, against the very integrity of personhood. It is then "chanchala", - Flickering, unsteady, inconstant. To be truly kind therefore is to never waver. To be as strong in that moment as you are all other moments, should you be needed. To be kind is to be so as a natural sequence of one's permanent Character.