Caring Is Not a Weakness

Kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring empower.Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash

There’s a loud, obnoxious message permeating the collective consciousness these days. That message is that kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring make you weak. That giving a shit about the welfare of anyone other than yourself or your specific group is somehow part of the “woke” agenda. The message is that doing anything for anyone other than you and yours is a sign of weakness.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not in any way a weakness to care about others and their welfare, even others you don’t know personally. The notion of “us” versus “them” is getting way out of hand.

When all is said and done, we are all one. Every single human being on Planet Earth is connected. This has nothing to do with God or some other higher power. This is the subatomic level where the base elements that everyone, everywhere, contains are connected. At our core, we are the same.

Despite the messages to the contrary, it is human nature to care. The interconnectedness of everyone means caring is in our DNA. Not caring, treating kindness, compassion, and empathy as weakness is a choice.

It’s a choice to let fear dominate you.

Fear of suffering is the main fear

Once upon a time, fear was essential to the survival of the species. Fear is what kept our ancient ancestors from getting eaten by predators, running at full speed along precipices, and swimming in obviously fast currents.  

When human beings evolved from hunter/gatherers surviving like the rest of the animals on the planet to what we are now, fear evolved, too. However, it became all about intangibles.

Yet every single fear can be traced to one place. Suffering. It’s not spiders, immigrants, failure, or intimacy that people fear. It’s the suffering that could occur should what the fear comes to pass.

That means it’s suffering from the spider bite, the immigrant taking your sovereignty, how those you care about treat you when you fail, or the pain of heartbreak. The fear of suffering is the underlying fear in the collective consciousness.

Then, to add insult to injury, it’s frequently weaponized. Some is blatant, like Trump and his cruelty. Some is subtle, like most advertising. Yet, at the core of our fear-based society, the fear that overwhelms all reason is the fear of suffering.

More often than not, the fear of suffering is far less than the actual suffering experienced. In the words of Paulo Coelho from The Alchemist,

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.”

How do you fight the fear? Kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring.

What’s more, kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring are desired by EVERYONE. I have never met a single person who doesn’t desire all of them. Think Trump would be the narcissist desperate for attention that he is if that wasn’t the case?

The truth is that kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring empower. They are not in any way a sign of weakness.

Photo by Arno Senoner on UnsplashWhy is caring held up as a weakness?

The short answer is because caring leads to empowering. To care, you look inside of yourself, become consciously aware of your thoughts and feelings. Conscious awareness leads to mindfulness. Mindfulness empowers you.

Think those in power want you empowered? Fuck no. No, they want you disempowered. That’s because when you and I are fighting amongst ourselves, they can rape, loot, pillage, and burn it all to the ground with little to no resistance.

Being actively consciously aware empowers you. It does that by waking you up to who, what, where, how, and why you are. Not because anyone is telling you these, but because you’re looking at them from within. That lessens the influence of religious, business, political, and similar so-called leaders.

If you think caring is a weakness, ask yourself this: How does it feel to know you are cared for? Do you desire to feel like people care about you? Are kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring things you desire to receive from others? I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t want to feel cared for in these ways. Even among the most depressed or introverted, they desire to receive kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring.

You know what is a weakness? Allowing fear to rule you. Ignoring logic and reason because they’re “woke”, “liberal”, or otherwise labeled negatively.

Before you doomscroll social media or allow yourself to go down the path to the potential suffering you fear, give kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring where you can. You give them, you get them. You empower others and become empowered in the process. That’s genuine positivity at its best.

Understanding that caring is not a weakness isn’t hard

It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.

When you recognize and acknowledge that kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring are forces of good and positivity, you can choose to give them more. Knowing that giving kindness, compassion, empathy, and caring brings them back to you, you can choose to use them alongside reason and logic to combat our fear-based society to help bring much-needed positivity into the world.

This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.

Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. From that dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.

Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.

The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, that can spread to those around you for their empowerment.

Thank you for coming along on this journey.

This is the five-hundred-and-ninety-seventh (597) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.

Please visit here to explore all my published fiction and non-fiction.

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