The Milk of Human Kindness

In 1966, after seven years of marriage, I left my husband. I left him for many reasons, one of which was our inability to communicate. He often said to me, "Don't tell me your troubles, I have troubles of my own." Oddly, when I left, he asked, "Why didn't you tell me you were unhappy?"

My mother encouraged me to go back to school, and I enrolled in a master's program at the University of Kansas to study speech communication and human relations. I wanted to know why human relationships fail.

Finally, after so many years of pondering this question, I've concluded that we humans have two choices. We can choose to be kind or we can choose to be mean-spirited. Most of us have chosen both at one time or another, but most of us also lean strongly one way or the other.

Human kindness stems from compassion, respect, and generosity.

Mean-spiritedness stems from egotism, insecurity, and schadenfreude.

Every day we get to choose which way to go.