Kindness

I really love Rend Collective.  I was just listening to a song of theirs called “Find Your Kindness” and I replayed it and then looked up the lyrics.  I love “Twenty first century life, Neon lights and satellites, How do we miss what's before our eyes.  Media can freeze ya, into collective amnesia, And I don't want to forget anymore.”  There is a line that talks about how they don’t want to live off the grid anymore (that grid line is interesting to me.  I know I would like to be self-sufficient when it comes to things, but I do not want it cost relationships with people.).  Another line I really like is, “Put a face to a name, a real person to the numbers game”
That seems to go with another artist I have been listening to called Andrew Peterson.  The song is “Be Kind to Yourself.”
I love what Lao Tzu said “Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”  And also what Audrey Hepburn said, “For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
Fair dinkum I do not want to live a life so regimented that I set unrealistic expectations on myself which I cannot meet.  To me that is a recipe for disaster.  I do not want to try to meet the unrealistic expectations I put on myself, or the unrealistic expectations of anyone else.
No wonder the song says “be kind to yourself.”  I can be really hard on myself.  All too often though, when I am hard on myself, I am hard on others too.  My expectation of them is unrealistic as I cannot do what I am asking of another.  Not fair on any of us really.
There seems to be a school of thought that says, I cannot be kind to you because you were kind to my enemy.  For me it is not a case of either/or, but all I can.  Besides taking sides is more difficult than treating all alike.  Apart from the fact I would not want to anyway, it is too difficult to remember.
I really think I can be demanding of myself while being kind on myself.  After all, if I set the bar so high that I fail then I have no one to blame but myself.  A number of small successes make a big success.  I can live with that.  Others can live with me when I can live with that.
What matters to me is not others living up to my expectations but me living up to them.  I need to be kind to myself for that to happen.  As Mark Twain said, “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
I can’t be kind to others if I am not kind to myself.