Kindness: Weakness or strength?

 

Don’t be too kind to strangers or else they’ll use you.

This sentence is all too often heard. As someone who was rather altruistic and had difficulty in drawing the line, that line is something that is worthy of being pondered on.

Kindness has many different variations in our life. It does not necessarily apply to charity work or philanthropy. Kindness is an emotion that is showed when someone you care about is overworked and you volunteer to help them, kindness is shown when you volunteer to help your parent in household chores, kindness is seen when you lend a willing ear to a troubled friend. Kindness is also sometimes when you stay by the side of someone who you know has gone through a lot but is still tricky and does not give you the praise that you deserve.                             

As someone who was a victim of being too kind, I realised that not everybody thinks the way I do. Not everybody feels the need to carry extra baggage around his or her lives for good deeds. In fact, the world has gotten so materialistic that you feel like nobody even cares about your heart. The worst part is that, being used by strangers does not quite hurt as much as being used by the people who you trust explicitly. Growing up, I figured that kindness is not exactly a weakness but in some way or the other, I dimly felt that it was my strength. I used to feel extremely low whenever I remembered how my peers took every possible advantage out of me but never cared even for a second to text me but now I’ve become rather indifferent.

I say that kindness is a strength, which everybody fails to recognize because it is the key emotion that helps in forgiving someone and starting afresh. Forgiving someone does not necessarily require affections for that person but being kind, enough to let that person have a second chance at being better is a feat that is rarely seen nowadays.

In a crude sense, nobody cares about double-checking himself or herself if they feel like they are putting their share of issues over somebody else’s head. It is unto to us to very kindly, but stoutly deny that unnecessary extra baggage which will probably not let you move forward.

Many people feel that this is just big talk coming from a teenager who talks rather than implement such stuff  in his/her daily life, but to be very fair I didn’t reach this conclusion all by myself. My family was always wary of that particular trait of mine and would always remind to be careful and guarded, but yours truly OBVIOUSLY had to do the opposite and end up in misery. Anyways what I am trying to say here is that people who will genuinely feel sorry for burdening you, people who truly appreciate your kindness or people who strive to return your kindness are as rare as William Shakespeare’s signatures (people say that only 6 known signatures of the author are known) .