In everyday life, people who are too kind are often seen as naïve; easy to exploit, unrealistic, or simply incapable of reading the world as it is. I, too, have often thought this way. Kindness is then interpreted as a weakness, as though life were nothing more than a matter of survival: an inability to draw boundaries, a failure to protect oneself, or a lack of understanding of how power and self-interest truly work.
And so, we begin to call intelligent those who know when to stop caring, when to walk away, and when to sacrifice others for the sake of their own safety.
Yet, when we look more closely, perhaps this is not how kindness usually happens at all. More often than not, kindness is chosen with full knowledge of its consequences, with the awareness that it may hurt. Many of us love openly while knowing we may be wounded, help without any promise of being helped in return, and continue to care even when we know that caring may cost us something. Perhaps kindness is not the absence of understanding, then, but the decision to remain gentle despite understanding exactly what the world is capable of.