Published via Ecency

Hello beautiful people! Happy New month to you all, and welcome back to my space. In this post, I will be writing about what kindness means to me.

Different Meanings
I am very sure that Different people would have different opinions and understanding about kindness and what it means. The Oxford Dictionary defines kindness as being friendly, generous and considerate.

Personally
In My own understanding, Kindness is all about love. In fact, I don't mind equating kindness to love. The love I talk about is far beyond the warm feeling that makes a woman' heart beat very fast when she hears the voice of a special,specific person.

I am talking about the love that makes you go out of your way to help people that need your help even without them asking.

My Experience
In my journey through life, I have found myself in different situations that I still don't know how I could have managed if there was no one to show me kindness.

I remember when I gained admission into the university several years ago, I had to travel from Onitsha, Anambra State (in South Eastern Nigeria) to Zaria, Kaduna State (in the Northern part of Nigeria).

That was my first time travelling very far from home, and also alone. The plan was for me to stop in Kaduna Town, locate one of my maternal uncles living there so that he would take me to my new school, Ahmed Bellow University, Zaria.

Unfortunately, it was already getting dark before our vehicle got to the motor park in Kaduna. Those were days of no mobile phones, and I had no means of getting in touch with my uncle so that he could pick me up from the vehicle station.

A young lady who was also in the vehicle was kind enough to ask me if I could follow her to spend the night in their home (her family were living in the city). Being someone brought up with warnings about following strangers, my first response was a "No, thank you!" But on second thoughts 🤔, I decided to accept her kind offer.

That night, I not only got a place to sleep but also had a nice meal after a journey of almost 12hours. The next morning, they drove me in their car to locate my Uncle's office and hand me over to him safely.

Kindness... And More Kindness
At one point during my years in the university, I was not able to get accommodation (that was my third year and I wasn't entitled to accommodation), someone offered me her bedspace for free, as she had a place to stay off campus. I was not even friends with this person but she heard about my situation and decided to help me.
There are several other experiences that I have had of people being kind to me. There had been times I had been on the verge of tears, but a kind word in the form of compliments brought smiles to my face. Sometimes it was a phone call from someone I never even told what I was going through.

Lessons Learnt
From the few experiences I shared above (and there are more, hehehe), you could see me being shown acts of kindness/love by total strangers. These are the things that have helped me learn to be kind to people who are not even close to me.

Over the years, I have discovered that it is even better to be kind to people who are not even in a position to repay me. This group of people include very young children, the elderly, the needy. I must not forget that animals also need to be shown some kindness.

The thing is, we all need to be a little more sensitive to the people around us because a lot of people are going through painful situations and yet they wear smiles on their faces. If we are not sensitive enough we might miss opportunities to show kindness to those that need it most.

Thank you for reading to this point. I, @ngwinndave, wrote this post. The images in this post were generated by Bing powered by DALL.E 3.