I have not had the kindness that I have needed. Sure many people including one special person (my sister) have been kind to me at different times and in different contexts or “spaces”, but you know what, if kindness was measured, I think that each and every one of us need enough of it, and in certain contexts. Nobody was more surprised than me that the Medium Company kindly made a pay-out to me for the reads and applause (claps) of three of my Stories, since I joined Medium on the 9th November 2018.

A tear welled up in my eyes as I took a breath and realized that along my own personal unique journey, some of the sadness and hurt that I have experienced, has been caused by a lack of kindness to me personally.

Up to when I received the reimbursement from Medium, I always thought that it is appreciation and acknowledgement for what I do, that I craved. Life is about stripping away the layers and getting to the underlying energy behind your feelings of want. To me, my being kind to others is “second nature” but I didn’t realize that what I give is what I need for myself to thrive upon.

I now know that it is KINDNESS that I also needed and that I am now receiving.

I acknowledge the kind intent of Medium in having writers and readers reward each other, and I acknowledge the kindness of people who genuinely clap my Medium stories.

We are beings in human form to live satisfied and interesting lives, in tandem with caring for our home, Earth, and for all other beings. Harmony and connectedness, with unharmful challenges, is the meaning of Life, I think. Well my Life has been far from being filled with harmony and love, but I have always felt a connectedness, as I talk about in my first post on Medium, which if you like, you can read at the link below.

For some reason, recently I couldn’t help thinking about the most hurtful things acted out by my adoptive parents. When I was around 13 my mother said to me “I hope you go blind” and this was because I absolutely love reading and writing and when my bedroom light was turned off, I would sit in bed with a torch continuing to read. One of my siblings reported me to mum and I will always remember their faces peering around the door with smirks and Mum saying “I hope you go blind”.

I love my adoptive mother and after it happened, I thought about it and thought that maybe my adoptive sibling had put that idea into my mum’s head and I decided that it didn’t matter. Even if that comment was her idea, Mum was just being cuckoo that day. But other humiliations and singling out of my twin sister and I certainly showed that we were the “adopted” ones, not totally accepted into the family. I’ll touch on one other happening, which I call “An unconscious Act of Unkindness”, which took me a lot longer to forgive.

At age twenty one I was quite dysfunctional (and this was because I am the oldest inter-country adopted person in Australia and had a lot of identity confusion, and as well I was abused by several brothers from the age of eleven years old, and I witnessed abuse happening to others, and I personally encountered a huge lot of racism from age eleven and beyond).

Grasping at trying to carve out a sense of who I was, I legally changed my name, by Deed, from my adoptive surname to my birth surname of Lai (which is pronounced Lie), but I didn’t tell anyone in my adoptive family. I barely had enough energy to survive, let alone think about the niceties of Life.

My adoptive father passed away 8 years later and later mum explained that he had left my sister and I a lot less in his Will than he had to his“blood related” children, and this was a punishment because I had dis-owned them by changing my name. Well I was more upset that the punishment had extended to my sister, who did NOT change her surname. I was confused and felt bad, felt that I had done wrong but at the same time I knew that what Dad had done was wrong.

You can say that one unkindness after another can make you “die a little inside” but I have a lot of stamina, patience and emotional intelligence, and I kept the internal flame that was me - alive and un-touched.

This action of Dad’s did upset me for a very long time, but I have forgiven him now for what I call an “unconscious act of unkindness”. I am intrinsically a trusting person and believe people do what they think is right, although of course sometimes the boundary lines are extremely thin and sometimes people step over those boundaries, where having compassion or understanding and forgiveness for them enters a higher level or a whole new realm, which some cannot enter.

My adoptive parents have both passed now and it is NOT my intention to cast aspersion upon them, far from it.

However I do have to CLAIM significant moments in my journey from which I have learned from.

There are unconscious or conscious acts of unkindness

My having to resolve my hurt feelings over these two cases have made me realize that it is partly unkindness that hurt me, and made me withdraw into my shell . Why did my parents not engage with me to know what was really going on? I often pondered this question and ascribed the answer partly to how they were brought up and to their personalities. An act of unkindness, even if not really purposely done to harm someone, can still hurt.

Don’t get me wrong. I am an intelligent person and am not an overly sensitive person, thinking things to be unkind when they are not. I am grateful for the multitude of kindness that I have received. I am grateful every day for all my chances in Life and for the possibilities, and for my food, shelter and water, and for the fact that I am not worse off.

Life is about the journey, and surviving means refining your coping strategies, based upon new information that comes to light.

Fear either makes you retreat or lash out or act out or it galvanizes you into corrective action or into counter-balance for your positive good, and the latter is what it has done for me, fortunately, over the past 3 years of doing inner spiritual work.

Kindness

You and other people doing little things for you or big positive things that YOU want or need is an antidote to F.E.A.R. or False Evidence Appearing Real.

If you don’t have enough kindness in various forms toward you, you start to feel un-safe, and to worry about what you are doing, and the low voltage under-current of fear starts. You see evidence of what you have done wrong or of what you can never have, but it is false evidence appearing real. For some of us, it rises and becomes full-blown as a part of the cycle from fear to upset to angry to resentful to bitterness to hatred. I know. I have experienced it.

I wrote a poem titled “Humanism-Racism” about the fear to hatred cycle and about redemption, when I was 21 and you can read it here on a page of my website Peace in Practice.

Luckily I am able to observe myself un-emotionally as well, and I made a conscious effort to stop this cycle, and decided to continue being kind to others, and to continue living.

We are all drops in the ocean, and one small conscious act of kindness can have a big ripple effect. Sow a conscious act of kindness, and let the ripples flow.

I titled this Story “Miracle on Medium” not to gush over Medium or anything but to describe that I feel that my posting on Medium has been the tip of the mountain which I have doggedly been climbing since I was born. The miracle is that I feel happy and safe now, and Medium and my being an active co-creator among all-that-is has been an inextricable part of this.