On Accepting Kindness

In the lovely essay How Will the Miracle Happen Today?, Kevin Kelly writes:

But the strangeness of “kindees” is harder to explain. A kindee is what you turn into when you are kinded. Curiously, being a kindee is an unpracticed virtue. Hardly anyone hitchhikes any more, which is a shame because it encourages the habit of generosity from drivers, and it nurtures the grace of gratitude and patience of being kinded from hikers. But the stance of receiving a gift – of being kinded — is important for everyone, not just travelers. Many people resist being kinded unless they are in dire life-threatening need. But a kindee needs to accept gifts more easily. Since I have had so much practice as a kindee, I have some pointers on how it is unleashed.

This resonates with me on many levels. 

I was a regular hitchhiker, for a time, in my mid-twenties. It was often frustrating, sometimes meant being cold and wet for an awfully long time. But I loved it. I loved being the “kindee,” the feeling of mutual trust. And, more than once, I vowed that I would always pick up hitchhikers when the opportunity presented (a vow I have not universally lived up to, but have lived up to more than most).

More generally, Kelly is right that we are not practiced nor particulary good, as a rule, at being kindees. 

“Not being a burden” is held as a high virtue. 

“I don’t want to put you out,” is a frequent response to an offer of help.

We can get better at this, and, when we get better, it improves the lot of both the giver and the receiver (and the lot of the world in general).

Kelly finishes his essay with:

Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?”

Here here.