Kindness Carries Weight

“Be the kindness you want to see.”

A friend asked me about that phrase this week. It’s one of those lines that can feel like a hand on your shoulder, until the world gets heavy. Then it turns into a real question: how do we keep choosing kindness when it doesn’t stop the horrors, and it doesn’t reach the people determined not to be reached?

I didn’t have a neat answer for him. I’m not sure I have one now.

What do we do when we’re surrounded by unspeakable things carried out by people or groups who don’t respond to kindness at all? When compassion doesn’t register. When empathy bounces off. When you scroll through the headlines before your coffee has even cooled and think, this cannot be what we’ve become.

We all want to be good humans. We want to help the people in our lives. We want to show up with love. But sometimes it feels like that goodness barely dents the larger reality. Flower power didn’t change the world… or did it?

Let’s be honest. Kindness does not reform people who have chosen cruelty. It does not dismantle systems built on harm. Some people will not be reached. Pretending otherwise only leaves us frustrated and disillusioned.

Some days I don’t want to be kind. Some days I want to be furious.

So if kindness can’t fix everything, why keep choosing it?

Here’s how I’ve come to think about it.

In my mind, it’s a scales-of-justice concept. On one side: violence, cruelty, power without conscience. Leaders who have lost their humanity. Systems that crush people. On the other: casseroles left on doorsteps. Late-night grading. “I’m here” texts sent without hesitation. Neighbors helping neighbors. The quiet, steady work of people who refuse to be cruel.

The second side rarely makes the news.

I do not believe the horrors outweigh the good.

They may be louder. They may dominate headlines. But volume is not the same as weight. The good in this world is constant. It shows up every day. And what shows up consistently carries weight.

The second way I think about it is this: kindness takes up space.

When cruelty fills the room, it feels inevitable. When kindness fills it, it feels human again. What takes up space changes what feels possible. The more space kindness occupies, the less room there is for cruelty to feel normal.

Does that stop every injustice? No.

But it shifts culture. It shapes communities. It builds pockets of safety and sanity. It keeps people from believing that cruelty is the only language left. In dark times, that is not small.

Maybe this is simple. But sometimes simple is what keeps us steady.

We cannot control people who have abandoned their humanity. We cannot dismantle every evil. But we can decide who we are going to be. If we let horror turn us bitter or cruel, then it has taken more than it already stole.

Choosing kindness is not naïve. It is defiant. It is a refusal to let darkness recruit you.

And back to that flower power question. Did it stop wars overnight? No. Did it end injustice in a decade? No. But it normalized protest. It made peace something you could say out loud. It planted a cultural memory that love and resistance belong in the same sentence. Movements matter not only because of what they change immediately, but because of what they leave behind.

Kindness works the same way. Its impact is not always dramatic. It is often quiet. But it endures. A child who experiences kindness grows up knowing it exists. A person helped in a dark moment carries that forward. A community shaped by compassion becomes harder to pull into cruelty.

That’s not small.

I don’t know if this is the answer I’ll give my friend. I don’t know if kindness fixes the world. I do know it keeps me human in it. And right now, that feels like something worth holding onto.

We may not see the full weight of it in our lifetime.

But weight is not the same as noise.

And kindness carries weight.