Just like we know that the sun will come up every day, we know that certain things will make a demand on our time every day. Most of us plug away at doing what we need to do, when we need to do it. We don’t always feel a giddy joy in fulfilling our responsibilities, in fact, we may never feel that way about them, but for the most part, we do what needs to be done: get up, go to work, take care of our families, start over again tomorrow. There isn’t anything exciting about any of it, most of the time. But we are not robots moving emotionlessly through space; we are human beings, choosing to act and to imbue our actions with caring and kindness, even those actions that seem mostly boring and ordinary.

Sometimes we don’t act as kindly as we ought; sometimes we just act out of habit.

Perhaps we don’t think about whether we are doing the ordinary things of our day kindly, or perhaps we don’t realize that it is kind to other people to do the ordinary things that need to be done throughout the day. We frequently aren’t thanked or made to feel appreciated and may even feel taken for granted, as we fulfill our duties without fail. Still, we are expressing kindness by doing the things that we need to do. Being responsible is kind, because we are counted on by other people to be regular and dependable.

If you are feeling like you can’t think of anything particularly kind that you have done today, you might think about all the things that you regularly do in the course of your day, because some of them are probably kind. If they are not kind, then you have a good place to start in adding more kindness to your days: add more kind things into your day, and add more kindness into the way that you do the things that you do. You are counted on by others and you can bless their day through your kindness to make your corner of the world a better place, a little bit at a time.