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Not a day goes by where the headlines proclaim meanness is the way.
Taunting someone because if their sexuality. Diminishing those whose faith is not akin to your own. Justifying your actions against women simply because “women are the weaker sex!”
Hey guys, it’s time to man up and be kind.
Somewhere along the road from infancy to manhood, we got sidelined. Distractions to be more of a man, prey upon the weaker – whatever that looked like, and cock our walk just because that’s what we men were supposed to, moved us from being kind to being dicks! Ok, not all of us. Well maybe all of us, but not all of the time.
Yet, I confess, I caught myself recently not being kind for no good reason. True, I thought I had a reason for my actions, but they were falsely misleading. I was jerking myself off thinking I was better, had more insights, and quite honestly thought my poo just didn’t stink, and then I overheard someone say, “Just be kind!”
At first, I thought I was lost in one of those dream sequences in a movie where right before the character is on the brink of death, the white light appears, and a voice – that ever commanding, save your ass voice is heard saying, “Just be kind!” You know that scene that turns everything inside out and upside down in a theatrical minute!
Ironically, my theatrical minute was for real and no one actually said those words to me. A little boy who was being berated by an obviously frazzled Father, shopping in Target, looked up at his Dad and said, “Just be kind!”
Dang. Kids really do say the darndest things. I had literally been thinking about issues I’m having with my own father. Cursing and swearing at him in my mind, castrating his existence, and wishing he’d just wake up see me for who I am.
I was spiraling into a void of pure anger towards my Dad. I’ve been here before. Sleepless nights, distractions from what matters, even to the point of watching my blood pressure go up. What a waste, what a waste, what a waste. All that energy when all I needed was a misbehaving little boy in Target with a haunting, begging voice, saying, “Just be kind,” to kick me in the ass and bring me back to reality.
Just be kind. No matter how angry I am with my Father, it’s time to just be kind. Or, to at least start with being kind with my thoughts towards him. Even though I am not ready, willing, or able to let him back into my world, I can at least stop having intense thoughts that diminish him beyond what he already has done.
Yes, he’s created an environment that isn’t kind, but does that mean I bolster up my defenses and do the same, just because we men are seen as weak if we are any shade of kind? I have a choice. You have a choice. We all have a choice to be kind, even in the worst of circumstances.
Of course, I could allow the repeating pattern of the generations before me in my Dad, his Dad, his Dad, and so on and so forth, drive me to be the Master of Assholery, wielding a sword of unkindness. Heck, I was already reaching for it, ready to enter the battlefield. In fact, my hand was curling its fingers around the cool, etched ridges, of the hilt. My thoughts were rampant, at the ready to wield that sword of unkindness towards my Dad for the shade he’d thrown at me.
Stricken in awe by three words of a little child, “Just be kind,” I paused in my rage of unkindness. It’s time to make room. Be a better man. A strong man. For the weak man is unkind and the strong man reeks of kindness.
I honestly don’t know where this road of kindness will lead, but given time, and starting with the simple gesture of changing my thoughts towards my father, I’m already feeling at peace. Where I once felt weak because of the unkindness he showed me which festered into a deeper state of weakness where my own unkind stories were debilitating my existence, I now feel empowered.
Truth is, when a man, or anyone for that matter, but especially a man, thrives in the world of unkindness, he is weak. He has no power. He has no true soul. He has no purpose. He only has weakness. A weakness that festers, eviscerating any real sense of self-worth of who he is, leaving him to lash out as the kind of unkindness. This man is the epitome of weakness, a misrepresentation of manhood.
Kindness knows no gender. It is simply an action that beckons us to ask the question, “Without kindness, what kind of a man am I?”
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