The Kindness Question I Can't Shake

I recently attended the Kindness in Education conference here in Bermuda. I came as a participant and I also had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop on kindness, what it looks like in practice and how we can embed it in school life for teachers and staff, parents and students. By the end of our session, the group had created a list of activities and approaches they could take back to their schools. Ideas that felt realistic and immediately useful.

I enjoyed the guest speakers and I especially valued the conversations at my table. There was an ease and openness in our exchanges, the kind that makes you hope the connection continues after the conference ends.

Conferences often leave you with a handful of good takeaways. Practical notes. Interesting frameworks. A few sentences you underline and later forget you underlined. But every so often, one comment lands differently. It follows you home. It keeps showing up in your mind at unexpected times.

One sentence has stayed with me.

What you walk past, you accept.

Huh.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with it. It felt too absolute. Too clean. Too accusing. And still, it wouldn’t let me go.

What do I walk past?

I’ve walked past an unhoused person and felt the familiar public refrain rise up in my mind: this is bigger than me, bigger than one interaction, part of a larger systemic problem. That thought can be true. It can also be convenient. It can let me keep moving with less discomfort, less guilt, less responsibility.

I’ve witnessed painful situations, tension between people, moments that look like they could turn and I’ve offered a silent prayer that it resolves, easily, peacefully. Sometimes prayer is the best we have. Sometimes it’s also a way of stepping around the moment instead of stepping into it.

I’ve seen litter on Bermuda’s roads and kept walking because someone else will pick it up, because I’m in a rush, because I don’t have hand sanitizer, because today is not the day I want to touch what someone else discarded.

So, I keep circling back to the question underneath the statement.

If I walk past something, am I accepting it?

And if I’m accepting it, what does that say about what I believe is normal? What I believe is tolerable? What I believe is not my role?

This isn’t a neat reflection, because life isn’t neat. There are real reasons we don’t stop. Safety matters. Capacity matters. Context matters. We can’t respond to everything. We’re not meant to carry the full weight of every problem we pass. And still, I can feel the discomfort of the question doing its work.

It’s making me more honest about the moments when I walk past because I truly can’t do something and the moments when I walk past because it’s easier.

It’s also making me think about kindness in a way that goes beyond being pleasant. Kindness is often framed as something soft, something optional, something we offer when it’s convenient. But real kindness has an edge to it. It asks for presence. It asks for courage. It asks for interruption, the willingness to pause your own pace and pay attention to what is in front of you.

The question I’m sitting with now is simple and not always comfortable: What am I willing to stop for?

What situations am I willing to offer assistance in, even in a small way?

What can I do in the moment that aligns with the kind of community I want to live in?

Can I live with the fact that I walked past something and did nothing?

Can I walk past while hoping someone else will stop?

Can I walk past and still call myself kind?

I don’t have tidy answers yet. But I do know this: that one sentence has shifted something in me. It has made me more aware. More awake to my own habits. What I notice and how I may respond.

Maybe that is one of the quiet gifts of a conference about kindness. Not just new ideas to implement in schools but a sharper lens on the everyday moments that shape who we are.

And perhaps this is where kindness starts, not in grand gestures, but in the decision to pause and ask: What am I walking past today? What am I willing to do about it?