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Unexpected: Five Inspirational Short Stories of Encouragement

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Jozua Van Otterloo

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“Risk stepping into the mess because, more times than not, on the other side of the tension there are new beginnings, strengthened relationships, and the knowledge that conflict is not something to avoid, but a means to a deeper, stronger, and kinder world.”

“Kindness that is fueled by guilt, pity, or colonialism is not kindness at all. Kindness is not currency or a commodity to be used to barter and bargain away the sins of our past or to alleviate our responsibility to be part of global recovery efforts in times of tragedy.”

“if we honor and value the complex ways in which people engage in organizational work, we are honoring the person and showing them kindness. At the end of the day, kindness in a meeting environment is about valuing the human before us: their time, their perspectives, and their personalities.”

“Kindness is not a journey for the meek and mild. For those of us who have been steeped in ways of being that are not kind, it takes tremendous energy to purge ourselves of patterns and behaviors that are not kind. Every day we have to choose to commit to live out kindness that day.”

“Kindness, after all, comes to him naturally; he was hatched in its lucky genre and embraces its attributes effortlessly. Gentleness, generosity and compromise are not for him learned skills; they have always been with him . . . It may, for all I know, have existed in his family for generations. He is not at the frontier as I am. For me kindness is an alien quality; and like a difficult French verb I must learn it slowly, painfully, and probably imperfectly. It does not swim freely in my bloodstream -- I have to inject it artificially at the risk of all sorts of unknown factors. It does not wake with me in the mornings; every day I have to coax it anew into existence, breathe on it to keep it alive, practice it to keep it in good working order. And most difficult of all, I have to exercise it in such a way that it looks spontaneous and genuine; I have to see that it flows without hesitation as it does from its true practitioners, its lucky heirs who acquire it without laborious seeking . . .”

“You can't condone exploitation and oppression, and demand not to be exploited or oppressed. You can't rule over the lives of others, and demand to be master of your own life. You can't walk around stabbing animals (or paying others to do it for you), and complain when someone does something to hurt you. You have to put out what you want back. Arguing that animals are small brained and therefore it's ok to mistreat them, is small brained. Arguing that animals eat animals and that's why you do it too, is behaving like an animal. Arguing that you're an apex predator when you've probably never even stabbed a single pig in your life makes no sense at all. Arguing "protein!" just shows how little you understand about nutrition. Arguing that our ancestors did so, is simply primitive. Kindness and compassion are not things to be mocked and jeered at, they are positive traits that are vital for the future of mankind and for the moral progress of humanity. If we are ever to see an end to tyranny of our own kind, by our own kind, we have to stop behaving as if we are the only species that matter! As Gandhi once said, you can judge the moral progress of a nation by the way it treats its animals.”