Kindness

Do you think that animals other than humans are kind? I like to pose questions like that to myself. This comes in part from the ages-old trope: "BLANK is the only thing that separates us from the animals." I don't ask these questions aloud. Very often, it sounds a bit nutty. Like a think tank run by St. Francis of Assisi. If a dog can have a sense of humor, then there's a good chance that he could be kind. That follows, doesn't it?

At the heart of it, I've been noticing how hard we all work at and succeed in being kind. I'm a bit amazed at all of the daily kindnesses that I see, all the gestures that we hope will morph into grace. That's what I want to be now: kind. More than anything, even more than being funky.