Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Kind vs obedient



This week I have again talked and chatted several times about kindness. I really don't like, when someone talks about being too kind or nice. In my opinion there is no such thing as too kind. This is an issue, that's important to me and I have wrote previous blog post about Too nice .

I had interesting Twitter conversation with my Finnish Twitter friends, which started from punishments and continued to bullying. And there it was again, the accusation, that someone was too kind/nice. By the way, what's really interesting is, that these children, who are "too kind" have many times parents, that are said to be difficult or even aggressive. Paradoxes of life ;-).

Then an idea hit me. When we demand someone not to be too kind, are we really talking about kindness? Is the real problem kindness? What if the problem is, that we are raised in the culture, that wants us to be obedient?

If we are taught to sit quiet and be obedient, where can we find our voice, the thought that we are worthy of defending ourselves? If we were taught more to be kind to each other, maybe there would not be such demand of defense in the first place?

History has taught us, that it's really dangerous to create such societies, where citizens blindly follow their leaders, where people are supposed to be 100% obedient. So it might be time to look our culture and how we raise children to be active citizens, whom have voice to use, when it's necessary. It's important to defend oneself, but it's also important to have a courage to defend other people too. And to accomplish that, we need to be kind to ourselves and kind to others.

So maybe it would be time to try to be as kind as we can?