Is There Kindness In Your Life?

This summer, the documentary film “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” became the all time top-grossing domestic biographical documentary. My local favorite theater, Film Streams, held the film over repeatedly, but this is not what makes the film startling. Rather, it is what Alissa Wilkinson notes in this Vox film review: “… the main goal of ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor’ is to convince us that while kindness and empathy are in short supply today, it need not be that way… And, in 2018, that makes Mr. Rogers a subversive figure.”

Whereas nearly two millennia ago Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius asserted that kindness is humankind’s “greatest delight,” our modern turn towards kindness is as an antidote to darkness, to mitigate nastiness around us, and to reclaim its benefits for our social lives. My latest eNewsletter, available here, offers some approaches, examples, and benefits to embracing kindness in our lives.