The Great Act of Courage within Human Kindness
By W. Owen Thornton

As we’ve said before, human kindness towards others begins with being kind to you first.  Love others as you would love yourself is a key ingredient that leads towards happiness and a kinder world all round.  A startling revelation occurred to me while reading the book Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters, (SBTL) by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery and Mark Thompson.  Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that there would never be peace because humankind would continually seek fame, fortune and power.  These three temptations have been with us for centuries.  Porras (et al) would agree that this evil troika has ruled the minds of those in the Western World who believe these three elements in some combination equal success.

Success, according to Porras, Emery and Thompson is something completely different.  Success is doing what you love and finding meaning in doing it.  In fact, you love what you do so much that you would be willing to do it for free, yet somehow, if you stick with your dreams long enough, some of ‘fame, fortune or power’ appears to find you … but they never satisfy if we strive for them for their own sake.  According to the three authors doing what you love combined with a proper Thoughtstyle to think the way you need to succeed and an Actionstyle to do what you need to do to make you happy, creates a winning life formula for success – outside of fame, fortune and power.

What strikes me as extremely significant is this: while the world attempts to drive the version of success in fame, fortune and power into us with every breath, the successful people that I admire have one key ingredient which I find enigmatic: the courage to do what is right for them even when it means going against the flow of the contemporary world culture around them.

My questions to these ‘builders’ from the SBTL book are these:  How do these people face a world and go upstream without a paddle and still manage to succeed?  Where does that kind of inner knowing or rightness to do something and to be unconventional come from to give them the strength and the courage to be different?

I need to be specific here.  My whole life I have been interested in what makes people better.  I’ve learned success in life is often not what you know but who you know.  In Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat Alone he shares that the wealthy and powerful (using those definitions for success) know one thing: they can’t go it alone.  They need one another.  When they get stuck in a business plan or need assistance, they ask for help and they often get it.  Exotic, unusual ideas live and thrive because someone knows someone who knows someone.  The wealthy in Ferrazzi’s book learned long ago that if the first person laughs at your idea, there is someone along the way who won’t, and there’s someone who knows the thing or person required to make a dream come alive.  Their persistence is key to their success – going upstream when others would tell them to give up and coast back downstream.  This persistence of asking and getting (along with the other people doing the ‘giving’) creates a world full of … you got it … human kindness!

There are thousands of folk who study to take on some form of traditional career choice: lawyer, teacher doctor etc.  These are great dreams to fulfill.  They are also acceptable dreams to fulfill in the eyes of most folk (though I dare say some people who achieve these dreams may also have swum upstream against the wishes of others).  Family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances and strangers can all line up behind people heading towards traditional careers and support them because they understand them – or at least they think they understand these career paths.  Tell people you’re going to start up a free e-newsletter and website on human kindness (which in fact will cost you to operate) and where you see no method of earning a living from such a website and you start getting queer looks. (Well, okay … not from the friend who suggested I start it – but from many others!)

For me the gap between what I think others expect from me – or what the world tells me I should want and the direction I’m heading … they seem to be polar opposites.  I have never felt comfortable being this sort of … well to my way of thinking and how the world looks at guys like me, I’ve never felt comfortable being this weird guy who seems to do everything in an unconventional manner.  I don’t think there is a fellow in the world who wants to be more conventional than me.  Just let me become a teacher!  But the heck of it is I’m just not built that way.  Maybe there’s a flaw in my make-up, I don’t know.

But while I struggle with doing this crazy thing that I love and am convinced is right for me and for the world … this thing which gives my life meaning, I’ve never been really comfortable ‘out here in weirdland!’  (I know.  I know.  I do so much have to start changing my own language about this!)  How do you cope with being or doing something odd or different?  How do you live a life where you are someone the world tolerates but raises its brow at and hopes along the way that its normalcy sweeps you under the carpet, or better yet, breaks your resolve and compels you to do and be something everyone in the world accepts and understands?

The answers to these questions weigh upon my heart.

So many others in this world have done unconventional things and many of them have experienced far greater obstacles than I have.  Nelson Mandela served 27 years in prison for what he believed in.  How did he live through that?  How did he find the courage of his convictions for peace and equality to allow him to live through that?  Abraham Lincoln basically failed at everything he’d ever tried before he became the president of the United States that took that country to the brink of destruction all for the emancipation of the black slaves – a noble and worthy act which offered the reward of his assassination.  Me?  I’m nowhere in their league!

In a world where we are supposed to believe that things like fame, fortune and power, things outside of ourselves can complete us, we need to come to see the truth in this great fundamental lie.  Henri Nouwen, fast becoming one of my favourite authors, writes in his book Life of the Beloved, “I am overwhelmed by the dark voices telling me, ‘You re nothing special; you are just another person among millions; your life is just one more mouth to fee; your needs just one more problem to solve.’ These voices are increasingly powerful.”

Slowly, as I’m learning to accept my path, I’m discovering that peace and acceptance comes only from within.  Seeking fame, fortune and power only places us on a treadmill to seek more of it … to have our hopes and hearts dashed over and over again when they fail to bless us with eternal happiness.  When ‘the way of the world’ is our guide instead of our inner compass, life becomes an eternal struggle of doing things one way, while wishing we could live our lives in a completely different way.  In this ‘space’ the soul aches for freedom and the courage required to do what we know is right for us and to be the person we desire.  Nouwen said, “When we are thrown up and down by the little waves on the surface of our existence, we become easy victims of our manipulative world.”

Happiness must first come from inside … from loving ourselves.  Having read three Nouwen texts of late, I cannot remember which one said that the greatest disservice we give to ourselves is the rejection of our own souls.  He means failing to accept ourselves the way we’re made!  But if we can love ourselves, then when others tell us we should do certain things we can take that suggestion examine it logically and accept it or reject it because we know that we are on the right path for us … even when it is the path less traveled.  Nouwen adds, “How do we get in touch with our chosenness when we are surrounded by rejections?”

As each day wanes I’m finding that the gap between what I think I’m supposed to want and what I really want is lessoning … and in that process the stress and the apprehension lessons too.  And if I can come to love myself as I do that, I pay attention to what I have to do and worry less about what I believe others and the world thinks I am supposed to do.  Loving myself as I am helps me to love others as they are, whether what they do is conventional or very different.  Each day the world and what I think it’s telling me it expects of me matters less and less, and what I say about myself is what matters more and more.  But it takes dedicated discipline: mediation and time for the divine, on a daily basis.

Courage, I think, lies in knowing yourself and comprehending that you can know what is right for you despite what the manipulative world is telling you.  Surely it would have been easier for me to go out and become or do what the world says is ‘okay’ or what the world understands, but I’m coming to understand that writing articles about human kindness in a world where a British Columbia city is seeking the nicest person in Canada because its citizens believe there is too much rudeness in the world, is the ‘write-right’ thing to do.

Interestingly for me, the answer as to where do you find the courage to be like the successful people in Porras’ book, is right there in the book – though I admit I didn’t see it at first.  I believe that once you understand what you love and what adds meaning to your life, you develop the right Thoughtstyle almost intuitively.  You take stabs at doing things, like changing a website to a web-blog and relearning how to format text and images.  If the preceding effort failed, you learn from it and move on, but you don’t take it personally and let the failures dictate your course: you learn from them and you make them a part of your journey.  And once you begin to have the right thoughtstyle, you automatically develop the right thoughtactions: you begin to do the things required to do what you love and to do that which brings you meaning.

Here’s my personal example.  I have always asked questions about why the world works (or perhaps doesn’t work) the way it does.  Asking myself these questions seems to take me to a ‘world less traveled’ but I find it riveting.  I want to know what we can do to make ourselves and the world and life better.  In coming to understand these things for myself, I come up with these ideas that bubble up inside of me to the point that I will explode if I don’t share them.  This has always been my sticking point.  A: how do you share these things?  B: why would anyone else be interested?  C: Isn’t this just dumb and shouldn’t I go and become a ___ (name any ‘acceptable’ profession here.)

 Yet if I overcome these questions from a manipulative world and begin to give myself permission to be this person, there is passion there and meaning … for me.  It does not matter that this passion might not be anyone else’s passion or that the path is common or that I’ll ‘fit in’ should I follow it.  It’s just right for me.

 I am coming to believe then that asking where you find the courage to be different is not the right question.  I think coming to love yourself is the key to allowing you to grant yourself permission to walk the unique path.  Nouwen said, “Life is a God-given opportunity to become who we are.”  I think, however, I know now where the great human struggle lies and where courage is most needed.  The world has lied to us about understanding and loving ourselves.  The world tells us that happiness lies outside of ourselves.  This quest either masks or distracts us from what is important.  And it’s easy to let the world win because the courage lies in doing the following: finding a method to meditate so that we can listen to the divine and so we can find a way to meet ourselves so that we can come to love ourselves the way we are.

Why is this act courageous?  In a world of sadness, stress and increasing depression where experts suspect upwards of 25 percent of the population suffers from child abuse, where the world tells us is it better to go with the flow, to be like others, it takes courage to examine one’s self in order to see and comprehend and to love our own defective individuality.  We want to believe we can be happy by being like others, but this is a whitewash – the great lie of the world.  I was never happy there.  The effort of giving up ourselves to be like others costs us our soul, but in examining our souls so we can be different … ah … courage is required to begin looking at our defective souls is vital.  For to love ourselves is to love our own ugliness (not to like it, but to love it and this is a vital distinction) as well as our own giftedness.

And so you have a right to ask where does human kindness fall into this essay?  It is everywhere, my friend.  When we find the courage to examine ourselves and to define ourselves and to become who we are meant to be, we give up the lie of the world, we release stress, sadness and depression (because while the world tells us there is comfort in being like others it is a lie because we can never be as good as all the others we are attempting to be like – in the end we can only be good individuals).  And once we become loving towards ourselves we become the person we want to be and the person who can find happiness and when we’re in this state, we’re being first, kind to ourselves and then, because we’re kind to ourselves, we can be kind to everyone else in the world.  From this all good things flow.

Doing the unordinary, going against the flow isn’t solely about finding courage to do it.  Doing the right thing that you love and that gives you passion requires finding the courage to face yourself, to love yourself even in the fact that you do some things you don’t like or approve of (but that you are working on).  And in finding you, your passions, and what provides meaning for you: a true and meaningful life full of human kindness can be lived.