Is it better to be kind than to be truthful?
Before we talked further about what this article is all about. Let's first differentiate the words kindness and truthfulness. As most of the times we struggle to balance the two and often mistaken their meaning.
According to the dictionary, kindness means the quality of being generous, considerate, and friendly while truthfulness defined as the quality of being honest or not telling any lies.
The two may not complicated as we think, we only had conflict on how to deal or use it while communicating. Other use it separately but the two should be linked to each other.
Do you ever lied to someone because you don't want them to be hurt? Or you're always being honest to what you are saying because you wanted to be true?
Honestly, we often sacrifice one of those, either we communicate honestly and set aside kindness or when we try to be kind and not choose honesty. But as I said, those two should always be connected.
For me, honesty without kindness is not a real honesty or kindness without honesty is not a real kindness.
Honesty without kindness
For example, if you're friend told to himself that he was so idiot because he didn't passed the exam and you also said to him the same thing. You are not being considerate to understand you're friend's reasons why that might be the case.
Or if you tell him that he already did a great job even he was not. You are never honest when you prevent them from learning to the things that might help their growth.
Therefore, it was all not a real honesty because you didn't fix the things for it to be correct. Being complete honest needs to see the other person as a whole and not just the aspect of them that we are now concentrating on.
Kindness without honesty
One of the most example in this is that, when we gave food or things to someone and later on we can't feel any fulfillment or worse we regretted our action. Definitely, it is not an act of kindness because we are nit honest to ourselves and we are not sincere on the things we did.
So overall, aiming to be kind rather than honest often ends up on being unkind. A real kindness lead us to be honest with ourselves and to others, even it is difficult to do. Also, bring kindness and truthfulness or honesty together will help us understand individuals' behaviors and see clearly the reasons where they are coming from; their emotion, isolation, fear, etc.
I hope you enjoy reading this and stay tuned on my next article!
Let me know your about this, just comment down below!
# 95
: Saturday
: November 26, 2022
: Re-joyce
Hmmm... I don't know. For the samples, why need to be critical about passing something? the kindest thing to reply was, "he should be able to do it next time and have to work harder then!". I don't think we have to justify every word we need to say! The key is "discretion". Sometimes you have to be rude and frank for the person to wake up from the deadliest dream he is facing, else, he wouldn't be able to pick up the pieces from where he left. Another is be silent, if he was going through dark moments, just be silent and be there! Hold his hand until he is able to get by, until then... just that. Then when he is done, you can say, well... YOU MADE IT THROUGH THE RAIN!
We all get older. Our words may mean something to someone, the impact of your words to everyone around you is something that holds 'til the passage of time. Just make sure you encourage them or spark the light in them that no one else can. That way, your words, -true and kind, in every perspective - was useful.