My Journey With Health And Fitness – It Should Be Easy To Be Kind

After several days of construction inside our condo it looks like everything will be finished today. A large section of the tiles in our living/dining room had to be pulled up so that a new subfloor could be put in. Then the tiles all had to be put back and this morning they finished the grout work. We are now just waiting for the painting crew to come buy and do some touch ups after which cleaners are coming in to deal with all the mess. By this afternoon we should have all the furniture back and place so all will be normal again.

I belong to a community group on FB and I often times marvel at how people will jump on there and be outright nasty. The other day someone posted about being scammed by a bylaw officer because they received a parking ticket when the purchased parking time was nowhere near expired. I could not believe how quickly people started saying horrible things about the bylaw officer and several of them demanding that the worker be fired. I tried to put the breaks on things by advising the worker shouldn’t be blamed, its an automatic system and obviously his handheld device provided incorrect information. I think because of some of the comments the administrators of the site shut it down. The original poster came back complaining about being shut down and proceeded to make the same outrageous claims. I posted back to her that what she was claiming was not logical, the worker wasn’t trying to scam her as the ticket would be paid to the city. I again asked that the system rather than the worker be blamed and that since she had proof that her parking time hadn’t expired it is quite a simple process to have the ticket canceled. At the end I noted it should be easier to be kind than to be nasty.

I’m going to make a case in point about it being easy to be kind. The other day when we are at the waterpark it was a fairly long walk back to the car especially if like my brother you have an artificial leg. Unfortunately he is having problems with his lower back when he walks too long (likely a posture issue because of his leg so he has agreed to see my physiotherapist when we get home). The pain is apparently quite debilitating and at one point he needed 2 people to help him to a chair so he could sit for a bit. As he was trying to get up a young man came over and apologized for butting in but he could see my brother needed help. This guy was big and muscular and he asked my brother if he had lost his leg serving his country. He then went on to tell us he was a former marine (that did not come as a surprise) and he basically carried my brother to the awaiting car. This man was so polite and quite frankly gentle that I thought this is how we all need to be everyday. We all thanked him profusely and he brushed our thanks off because you don’t leave a fallen man down.

I’ve decided when reading too much of the nastiness on social media, and there is a lot of it lately, I am going to turn my head back to the kindness of that young man. He certainly did not have to step in as he did but to him exhibiting that level of kindness is what you do. To me most of us could use some of that gentleman’s personality, kindness and help should be intuitive and should be the first thing we all reach for.

So go out there and be kind each and every day.