We need kindness more than ever right now.
For more than a year, we’ve had to make decisions based on fear and uncertainty — and most of us aren’t at our best under these conditions.
For very good reasons, we’ve upended our lives and readjusted our days into ways we never could have imagined. We’ve constantly had to make choices that feel right for ourselves and our families, even if they look different from those of our loved ones or neighbors.
While there have been silver linings in this pandemic year, and many ways in which we’ve been changed, I think we’re all looking forward to emerging, even just a bit, from our pandemic lifestyles this spring and summer.
But what I fear is that a darker undercurrent of this time will come out in full force as we do this. And that is judgement.
As we’ve been at home and had to make decisions with so many unknowns, it’s become so easy to judge others for their choices, whether their actions seem too risky, or overly cautious or something else entirely.
Because it’s taken so many leaps of faith for each of us to decide how to navigate this scary and uncertain time, it can be hard when we see others taking different approaches.
And as we start to venture out a bit more — knowing that doing anything new and different is going to feel weird and oftentimes even wrong — it’s going to be all too easy to throw judgement at others as they take their own wobbly steps forward.
So that’s why we need kindness. And grace and empathy and understanding and support.
If someone’s choice concerns you, ask about it with open-mindedness, not assumptions and reproach. Remember, especially as we’ve all been locked down and isolated, we truly don’t know what anyone else’s situation and day-to-day have been like, and what looks like a bad move to you could be them doing their best or being forced to make an impossible decision.
No one expected what this past year brought. No one had a guidebook for handling it — and no one has walked through it perfectly. That’s never been the goal.
My hope is simply that we’ve survived this time. That we’ve made the best decisions we could, day after day after day, with the information we had and with the best intentions toward ourselves, our families and our communities.
And that as we make this next round of choices, that we continue to show kindness to ourselves and to everyone else figuring out their own imperfect path ahead.
– Katie Vaughn
Katie Vaughn is the editor and co-founder of Northerly. She is a University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford University-trained journalist with experience as a writer, reporter, editor, blogger and author. She lives in Madison with her husband, daughter and son, and is always up for an adventure.