The Slow Walk to Kindness

Trying to find the kinder me

Mindful meditation has become so popular over recent years that I am sure most people are aware of it by now. For those who may have just escaped after being captured by aliens, or who have been living in a total news void, here is how it works in a nutshell. You start off your day by spending five or ten minutes emptying your mind and focusing simply on your breathing. Gradually, as your skills in this area develop, you become better at focusing on the present.

Many people tend to spend much of their mental energy worrying about things in the future or regretting things from their past. As both of these are impossible to really change, this energy is wasted. Meditation, and particularly mindful meditation, aims to develop one’s ability to engage with the present and, in so doing, have a fuller life.

Instead of wastefully devoting mental and emotional energy to things beyond your control, you learn to get the very best out of the here and now.

I sympathize with the aims, recognize the problems that they are trying to address, but still, fail dismally when it comes to meditating for more than a few days in a row. Like many people, my mind is more attracted to doing than it is to resting and within a few minutes of starting to try to meditate, I am mentally tweaking my ‘to do’ list.

My failings aside, I recognize the benefits that can be achieved by mindful meditation and would dearly love to become a better practitioner. It is a subject I am quite often called to write on as a ghost-writer and all my research shows that there is plenty of scientific evidence pointing to how well it works if done correctly.

Recently I uncovered another angle to this practice that further reinforces why I should be doing more of it. Mindfulness can make you kinder. If there is one human characteristic that I could use more of, it is kindness. I suffer from what I like to think of as a low tolerance for fools and what my wife calls ‘grumpy pants’.

The problem probably lies in the definition of what constitutes a fool and mine is exceedingly broad. People who drive or walk too slowly, people who talk too fast, people who use shopping trolleys without any training or natural ability. The list is endless. It also includes people who go out in public with their bums sticking out of their trousers, people walking while texting and almost anything to do with politicians. Politicians with funny hair, I should mention, are doubly suspect. I also get to decide who has funny hair and who doesn’t. This is not even a snippet of my long list of people who would benefit from me sitting them down and giving them a long talking to (and that’s on a good day).

The sad thing is, that though I am a cantankerous old man, I really value kindness very highly and believe that it is something the whole world could do with a lot more of. (That's not me in the top photo by the way.)

I married my wife because she is a kind person. She also tells me that she married me because she is a kind person.

Learning to pay more attention to the current moment could alleviate a great deal of the kindness deficit we are currently seeing. Living in the moment teaches people to focus more on those around them and that improves communication and has the potential to deepen relationships. Studies show that when kids are given an adult’s full attention regularly, they thrive. Conversely, children deprived of attention exhibit many of the same symptoms as those who are abused in other ways.

How many of us devote only a percentage of our attention span to the people with whom we are communicating? Very often those we neglect the most are those to whom we are closest. How much better would our marriages be if we simply devoted more time to listening to our spouse?

I am sure that we have all become involved in conversations where it was obvious that we were only receiving a part of the other person’s attention. Contrast that with those times when someone has really taken an interest in you, in what you do and how you feel. It makes you feel important and at the same time, though you may have dominated most of the conversation, it makes you better disposed toward that person.

Often you will have come away from those conversations thinking that person was really interesting, while the truth is, all they really did was listen.

Exactly where that leaves me in my own quest to improve my kindness levels remains to be seen. I hope that recognizing that I need higher levels of empathy and desiring to get more are at least stepping stones in the right direction. One thing I am sure of is that I will need to pay more attention to paying attention.