Connecting the Threads of Kindness by Kelly Knox
May 26, 2019

I came across kindness by accident. Kindness as a project that is.

Kindness in general, that was birthing happenstance. My mother is one of the kindest people I know. I never heard her say an unkind word about another person my whole life until the summer of 2016. My mother, whose kindness mantra is don’t talk religion or politics still insists it is not politics she speaks of, but common human decency.

Back to the project. The Kindness Project is a series of events throughout the year, each a semi-structured conversational exploration of what kindness means to ourselves, our families and the greater community, with topics that build upon themselves. In November we will have a Big Gloucester Kindness Bash.

The vision of the kindness project is to broaden our definition of kindness through honest and open conversation bringing value and strength-based kindness to the forefront of the minds of people in community.

As I mentioned, the idea of The Kindness Project came about by accident.

I was on my way down a rabbit hole of curiosity that only Google can offer, when an unexpected policy paper popped up in my search results: Kindness, emotions, and human relationships: The blind spot in public policy. The paper was written by Julia Unwin, a CarnegieUK Trust Fellow.

It is a wonderful read. If you are interested let me know.

For me, the big find in the paper was this: The Scottish Government adopted kindness as one of its core values in its 2018 National Performance Framework. According to Unwin, “Its role in the framework … establishes kindness as one of the things for which government, and public services, intend to be known for, and is something which all Scotland’s citizens can expect.”

The report also acknowledges that most people working on big policy issues cringe when kindness is brought up in discussions about policy. This struck me as odd. Some of the people making decisions about our social wellbeing believe making policy with a lens of kindness is absurd? Yet, Scotland bravely put on those glasses.

I became curious. What if we started local? What if cities and towns across America began making policy through the lens of kindness, based on identified values? Would it trickle up to state to our federal government?

Then I realized, at some level Gloucester is doing that. The plastic bag ban. If you provide a kindness metric to that ban based on Gloucester’s value of ocean life, it is a kind policy. If you provide a kindness metric to the Angel Program based on the value of respect and dignity for all life, it is a kind policy.

I had coffee with a city councilor to talk about this. She had never thought about these policies through the lens of kindness. She liked the idea.

Marylou, a great thinking partner, and I began talking more and more about kindness. What it is what it isn’t. How we struggle with it. How could we get the community to be more conscious of kindness? What would that do? How could that make a difference? Is kindness merely something to do, as in random acts of kindness? . . .

Random Acts of Kindness. I see them everywhere. I’ve had someone in front of me at Starbucks pay for my coffee. Twice. The concept is attributed to Anne Herbert who scrawled “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” on the wall of a restaurant in Sausalito, California in 1982. I was a junior in high school.

We have a full generation and a half of young adults who grew up learning about random acts of kindness. It’s infused into public-school curriculum.

A beautiful thing, right?

Only it’s come with an often unfortunate, unforeseen consequence: Kindness became a thing to do, rather than a thing to be.

What if we created a way of threading all the acts of kindness together into one big, interesting and dynamic cloth?

Kindness is all around us. Every single day. Especially here in Gloucester. acts of kindness abound. The more I work on this project, the more I realize how kind people are. My perception is changing. Nothing else. Just how I see things.

Back to my mother. The lack of decency displayed on the world stage in 2016 caused her to break our family’s kindness rule, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. But it also caused her to be self-reflective, more honest about her kindness, more realistic about the truths of kindness. It has been three years since that initial conversation revealing a lack of kindness. Since then, we and I mean we as a people, as a nation, we have lost a lot. And the irony is we have the opportunity to regain kindness as a result, because:

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.