What’s the trait you value most about yourself?
All people who raised me were kind. And especially, my paternal grandma with whom I spent two years of my life in Donbas and on a farm in the south of Russia each summer.
The love I was getting from her (together with my cousins) was unprecedented. We would wake up each morning to the delicious smell of pancakes or homemade pastries, and I am baffled as to where her energy was coming from. On a farm you wake up at five o’clock in the morning, together with roosters, to feed all the animals, milk the cow and send her to the field to enjoy her day.
Once bigger, around when we were seven or eight years old we would start helping at the farm, just little things: take the weed out, go into the field to milk and cuddle the cow, feed the chickens, really small pleasant things that made our childhood beautiful and unique. We were 5 cousins, 5 children coming each summer to the farm, and for each of us, Vera (my grandmother) would show a load of love.
I think that I also became kind, thanks to seeing so much kindness while on a farm. And later on I would attract kind people into my life. It was the kindness of my friends that helped me to survive difficult teenage years back in Russia, and kindness of strangers towards me to find good jobs, settle in different countries in Europe, and make me feel good about myself. Someone told me that people with bipolar disorder are usually very kind, we possess a soft character. Is it so? I am not sure but my friends love me and they often tell me that I am kind.
But is kindness still a virtue in our highly competitive world?
I overheard once a mother and her daughter. A person next to them said:
“Your daughter is so kind”.
And do you know what was the reply of the mother?
She said: “oh, I am not sure whether it’s a good thing to have nowadays”. “It’s being resilient that matters the most”, she added.
Well, with my vulnerability to psychoses, I suppose I show great resilience, by continuing to lead an extraordinary interesting life, despite my psychoses. A very difficult life, but definitely not boring, and it’s the kindness of my friends that always helped to recover and resume my life after each of my psychoses.
And I try to show some kindness back.
What do you think?
Do you think that kindness is still a virtue?
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