We are all individuals travelling our personal journeys, consciously or not. Either we are lost in the dark or travel with intention. Both on a mental and emotional plane, effected by a physical world. Coloured by our surroundings, other individuals journeys and the world as a collective whole. The people we surround ourselves with effects us more than we might be aware of. The individuals we meet throughout our life, no matter the circumstances or the timespan, leaves memories and scars. They might even change our course of direction without us realising.
We move in an inner and outer world of chaos and order. Mostly chaos some might say. We need chaos. Without it, there is no order. Without chaos we don’t evolve. We can draw this train of though even further. We can insert the terms good and evil. With this I’m not trying to take us down the path of the hero and the villain, but the path of understanding that our perception of ourselves and the world can be experienced as a good and a bad. We experience joy and suffering, and we need both to know the other. With that said, and I do have point to this, we don’t need to make others suffering a worse experience in an already chaotic circumstance. We don’t need to be cruel, evasive or indifferent towards the people we meet in our paths. I think we sometimes have our heads so caught up with our own circumstances and our own journey that we forget that the individuals we meet carry the same emotional and experiential system as us. Most people have some association to the term Butterfly effect – in the sense of the movie or the actual term itself. I believe we all carry the butterfly effect with us every single day and just to clarify:
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic no linear system can result in large differences in a later state.
And this would be the right place to insert:
If you can be anything in this world, be kind.
In which I do believe by the way, but there is more to it than just flat out kindness. It’s about awareness. Are you aware that your words and actions can change someone else’s course? That your flakiness, evasiveness and fear might create a whole new dimension of chaos in someone else’s journey? – or kind and genuine words for that matter. That our selfishness and fear of hurting cause even more pain on the other side of the coin? Why can’t we, as a collective and as individuals, be more aware of each other? Be more genuine and honest, both with ourselves and with others. Think about how we effect others just as much as they effect us? Tune up that empathy and really consider what it would be like to walk in the other persons shoes? Stop being so damn judgemental all the time? Ok, I am painting this with grim colours, but the thing is that most people don’t realise that what they do, or even what they don’t do, can cause a great change in someone’s life. It’s not about stripping away chaos, because being aware and doing the genuinely right thing might not be as pleasant as just avoiding it all. But the avoiding adds mass to the already grim chaos. And wouldn’t it be nice if we all, just even one percent, had a slight approval in our meetings with the outside world?
The reason I’m hesitant about just throwing out quotes about kindness here and there as an effort enough, is that I’m not really sure if we’re all on the same page when it comes to defining what kindness really means. I often see the invisible parallells drawn between kindness and people pleasing – and kindness has nothing to do with pleasing others. Being kind is not about boundlessness. Kindness is about coming from a place of love. Love for yourself and/or for others – and from a place of awareness and understanding that your actions, as small as a butterfly’s wing stroke, can create a storm elsewhere. As I read this back I see that we would benefit from a definition of love as well, but that might take a series of posts to get through, so I think I will leave it at that and move on to my point:
If we could give to others what we wish for ourselves, we might just make every individuals journey a more pleasant voyage. Or just what Jesus said:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
x
