Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good Morning, If you went for an interview and were asked what qualities you needed to succeed in life, would kindness be one of them? A friend once took a viva at an Oxford college. At high table that evening, one of his examining professors praised the brilliance of the college’s most illustrious old boy, a portrait of whom loomed over the dining table. When my friend asked ‘but was he a kind person?’ the professor was befuddled. Kindness was not part of his metric for assessment. As it happened my friend didn’t pass his exam. Today, another professor, and a team of researchers at the University of Sussex, are taking the subject seriously. As part of their study, they have created with the Â鶹Éç, The Kindness Test. It is devised to explore people’s attitudes towards kindness. How much they value, practice and receive it. I took the test. I thought this an act of kindness in itself as it took 30 minutes, but it was worth it. Afterall, the study defines kindness as any behaviour intended to bring benefit to others. Part of the problem, as my friend discovered, is that kindness is sometimes thought of as nebulous, a bit weak and anti-competitive. It doesn’t quite fit in with the hard-nosed world of getting on, where the ‘me’ is always eclipsing the ‘we’. There is also a prejudice that it is little more than enlightened self-interest. An evolutionary survival mechanism to keep the kin in kindness and ensure we look out for our own. For if charity starts at home, does it not tend to stay there? And yet life – especially during the pandemic - suggests otherwise. Acts of kindness abound. And these are just the ones we know and hear about. For they are often unconditional and, at best, hidden; and require no hashtag or signalling. They are sometimes done in secret, without someone’s right hand knowing what their left is doing. I am sure I have benefitted from a thousand kindnesses whose source I’ll never know. It’s said that is more blessed to give than receive. Research has shown that performing an act of kindness actually gives a physiological boost to the giver. Perhaps that warm glow is a happy side effect signalling that something more profound is going on. When we give or receive kindness, it is as if we are drawn into a better way of being. Far from being soft and extra, kindness connects us to something solid and essential. It’s possibly the invisible glue holding everything together. Kindness redefines our notions of kin beyond those we know or like - making us question, as Jesus did, who our mother or father or neighbour is - and to include the other, the stranger, and even our enemy. For in the end, we are all still Human Kind.