If you go onto Twitter or the comments on YouTube you are going to see some of the most outrageous, rude and cruel comments about people that you could ever imagine. Thankfully these are mostly keyboard warriors who are trying to spark a reaction, and the majority of those people would never dare speak in that way to anyone in real life. When I was at college I made friends with the incredible Bharat Bhise, a kind man who would often speak about the importance of being nice to others. Even in tough situations he would always be kind, patient and pleasant to people. Bharat certainly inspired me to be a better person, and here is what he taught me about the importance of being nice to people.
All Fighting
Almost everyone has something going on their lives that they are forced to deal with, we don’t know what that is, but very often when people are angry or upset it is for this reason. The last thing that people need, be it friends, family or strangers, is someone being unkind to them, what good does that really do? If you find that you are being unnecessarily cruel to someone, you have to look in the mirror and work out what is going on in your life that has caused you to be that way.
Passing it On
I remember Bharat giving me this great lesson about being nice after leaving a car park of all places. I had put 3 hours on the ticket and only used 2, so I naturally gave the ticket to someone who was entering in to the car park. Bharat asked me what made me think of that and I told him that someone did it for me just after I passed my driving exam. It was at this point he reminded me that being kind is the same thing, you do it for someone and then they pass it on to someone else. Globally this is an incredible theory and the notion that my kind act result in that person doing the same is about as heartwarming as it gets. Cruelty is also passed on, someone is disrespected so they then do it to someone else, wouldn’t the world be better if we replaced this with kindness?
You Never Know
They say that karma can come back to bite you and we have seen this happen many times. With this in mind then, the person who you are nice to may meet with you again someday, perhaps under very different situations and remember those kind words. I recall seeing a video on social media of a man being extremely rude to a guy in the street over a parking space, and then the story next to it was how that same angry many went for a job interview and lo and behold, the interviewer was the victim of his ire. This of course is an extreme example but it does go to show just how careful you have to be, and the best answer is just to be kind to people you meet.
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