On Kindness...

One day I hope to become a doctor. Whatever I decide to specialise in my primary aim will be the same: to have a reputation for being (1) knowledgeable and skilled in my subject area, and (2) kind to my patients and colleagues. It sounds simple enough but these are probably the two things which the majority of people value most in a doctor. Whereas no clinician can realistically go without being knowledgeable or skilled for too long before they get struck off, basic kindness is something with is perhaps neglected a little by too many. Being kind involves treating each patient as a person first and foremost, a person with their own individual personality and requirements which need to be understood and appreciated in order to make the best mutual decisions in their healthcare, rather than just as another case, a problem to be solved, or a statistic in a database.

In the meantime, it is a trend that has been noticed by many over time, that people on the whole are getting less polite and less thoughtful about others. I'm not talking about people's friends and family necessarily, as much as I am the strangers we meet every day. It's about little things like smiling, using P's and Q's, holding doors open, offering helping someone at the train station with their luggage, and not ignoring the homeless person at the side of the road. These are the simple yet kind things we could reasonably expect from the majority (rather than the minority) of others if society hadn't partially disintegrated. And I know I'm guilty sometimes for doing some of these things too infrequently.

It's not all doom and gloom though...

One recent notion has been that of performing so-called random acts of kindness above and beyond those described above. These typically involve cheering up or assisting a stranger that one will probably never see again or even never see at all! They can be monetary or otherwise, extravagant or simple, for loved ones or for strangers - there is no set formula for what one of these acts constitutes, other than that the result makes all the parties who leave the little microcosm in which the act occurs happier than when they entered it.

The Random Act of Kindness Foundation was apparently set up in 1995 and has been promoting the worldwide soreading of kindness ever since. However, it was one of my favourite films, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (or just Amélie outside of France), which popularised the concept and where it also caught my attention.

This is a top-notch film - 5 stars in my estimation. I just fell in love with the character of Amélie - who appreciates (and deprecates) the small details in life just as I like to do. I also love her random acts of kindness, such as when she the blind man she sees every day at the Metro station by the arm and walks him along the street to road to the station temporarily giving him the gift of "sight", something which obviously gives his character a fuzzy warm feeling inside!



This whole concept just makes me think how much I'd like to cheer up people as a hobby, through unexpected leftfield acts, in addition to helping them in more conventional ways. Now imagine if everybody did the same, how much misery would be lifted from our 21st Century society, because whether the effects last for minutes, hours, days, weeks or a lifetime, happiness is certainly infectious...

Here are some ideas to try from the RAK Foundation's Twitter blog (KindTimes) plus a few extras:

• Let someone go ahead of you in line.
  
• Give someone a flower.
• Visit a nursing home with smiles and friendly conversation.
• Help your neighbour with gardening.
• Pay for the person behind you at a toll booth.
• Buy a homeless person their favourite hot drink.
• Write a kind note and stick it on the inside of the door to your building.