One Liner Wednesday – #1LinerWeds

Being nice isn’t the same thing as being kind.
Donna Cameron, A Year of Living Kindly

I think this is my first One Liner Wednesday. Maybe. I’d been thinking about kindness, or rather, the general lack of it, the dearth of it, that we seem to have when I ran across the book, A Year of Living Kindly.

Even niceness is in short supply. I was on a Facebook comedy site, for crying out loud, and stupidly read the comments section. I emerged needing a bath and a stiff drink (or two). If you’ve lived in the southern part of our country, you’ve seen almost institutionalized nice that is anything but kind. “Bless your heart. . . ” said with honey dripping sweetness is often code for “you’re an idiot.” Nice can be nice. Or nice can be a slathering of polite over a seething of eff-you thoughts.

Kindness can’t be that. Kindness, as I understand it, is selfless. It doesn’t have an agenda. It isn’t judgey. Being kind can be really hard. Nice can be faked; kind cannot.

It’s called random acts of kindness, not niceness, for a reason. I think I’m going to read the book from which the quote is taken.  — Namaste!

For Linda G. Hill’s weekly prompt: One Liner Wednesday.