The year after the lockdowns, the world didn’t get kinder.
That surprised me.
I had imagined people returning to public spaces with newfound grace — soft eyes behind lifted masks, hands reaching for one another not out of fear, but with the quiet understanding that we’d made it. That we had seen each other’s fragility and would now treat it as sacred.
Instead, the world rushed back into itself.
People jostled.
Voices rose.
The noise returned — faster, louder, angrier somehow.
One morning, in the stillness of my coffee ritual, I whispered aloud,
“Where did the kindness go?”
The room didn’t answer.
But something inside me stirred.
A memory.
A voice.
A sentence I had underlined twice in my journals:
“Kindness is the whisper we search for when the world is too loud.”
I thought of Flo then. Not a friend exactly, but she had long felt like one. Florence Scovel Shinn — that curious, courageous woman from a century ago. She believed in something she called Divine Design: a kind of blueprint for your best life, activated not through force or striving, but through thought. Through belief. Through kindness.
I didn’t fully understand it back then.
I’ve always written my thoughts — diaries, journals, notebooks. Writing soothes me. So it felt natural to reach for an old notebook, the one with curled corners and pages softened by touch. I flipped to a page dated April 23rd:
Today is Thursday. Two months into self-isolation through the pandemic.
The world is strange — particularly attitudes toward human life.
I hope with all my heart this callousness and emphasis on money changes.
I want the world to be a nicer, kinder place when this is over…
Today is Thursday. Two months into self-isolation through the pandemic.
The world is strange — particularly attitudes toward human life.
I hope with all my heart this callousness and emphasis on money changes.
I want the world to be a nicer, kinder place when this is over…
My fingers rested lightly on the page.
That season had left an imprint — unspoken yet deeply felt. The streets had fallen silent. Life had folded inward. But for me, the stillness didn’t bring fear.
It brought an invitation.
I began listening differently — not just to news headlines or government updates, but to something beneath them. The ache I felt when human life was treated as collateral. The tug in my chest asking me to look deeper.
That’s when I returned to Flo.
Her books had sat on my shelf for years, but now I read her with new eyes. One name led to another — Catherine Ponder, Neville Goddard, Emmet Fox. Ideas braided together. I scribbled in margins, followed threads, connected dots.
What surprised me most?
That this spiritual trail had roots in Scripture. Not the dogma I had once rejected, but something deeper. Words like grace, faith, and abundance softened and opened. They began to breathe.
There was power here — not in controlling outcomes, but in trusting a kind of divine order. Not in manifesting wishes like magic tricks, but in aligning with something wiser. Something larger.
I smiled, remembering how strange it all felt at first. And yet, something inside me whispered: Keep going. Trust the kindness.
It wasn’t just a thought.
It was a knowing.
Not a doctrine. Not a set of rules.
But a gentle unfolding. A return.
A way of moving through life that honours both mystery and mess.
Kindness — not as niceness, but as a spiritual stance. A compass.
I hadn’t planned to write about any of this. But then again, I hadn’t planned for any of it.
This isn’t a guidebook.
It’s a remembering.
Of what I learned when the world stopped.
Of how kindness became my compass.
And how, one quiet day at a time, it changed everything.
The ink still feels fresh when I think of it. I remember how fierce that longing was — not just for survival, but for softness. For meaning.
“Infinite Spirit, open the way for my abundance…
I cast the burden of the how and live in the knowing — it all shall be.”
Flo’s words carried me through.
And now, all these years later, I still feel the shimmer of that moment.
Not the fear — but the clarity.
The ache for something better.
I doodled in the margin:
Kindness. Power. Magic.
Then, in darker ink, I wrote:
The Magic of Kindness.
. . .
Kindness doesn’t always arrive as a grand gesture.
More often, it comes as a whisper — something we sense before we understand.
In loud seasons, it’s easy to miss. In stillness, it finds us again.
What I’ve learned is this: kindness isn’t just something we offer others. It’s a way of listening to life itself — to what asks for care, for patience, for gentler choices.
When we learn to hear that whisper, it becomes a compass.
Quiet, steady, and deeply trustworthy.
Journaling Prompt:
Take a moment to pause.
- When has kindness whispered to you, rather than shouted?
- What did it ask of you — and did you listen?
- Where in your life might a softer response be needed right now?
Write without editing. Let the whisper lead.
. . .
This is Part Two of The Little Book of Kindness. A growing series of stories exploring kindness as a way of seeing, leading, and living.