hello friend,
As 2024 comes to an end and we step in 2025, I hope that you’re where you want to be. And, if you’re not there right now, no worries. You’re part of an open and supportive community of people who fundamentally understand that a life well-lived is about more than achieving and acquiring, it’s about how we do the things we do, how we treat ourselves and others, and how we interact with our planet.
So, how does cultivating your own sense of gentle help with that? How does living more gently fit into a life of purpose, peace, and joy? In other words: Why gentleness?
Because it works.
Living gently is foundational to almost all wisdom and faith traditions for good reason. Gentleness is inherently relational: it connects our minds with our hearts and bodies, and then connects us with the wider world. When you ask yourself how you can approach something gently, you inhabit a space where you are whole and able to sense interconnection with all who share this planet. When we’re living gently, we have the inner strength to see life as it is, and the wisdom to make skillful choices. When we approach our emotions and thoughts with gentleness, when we speak and act more gently, life is simply better.
If you’re skeptical, I get it. I was, too. And while I’m absolutely confident that you’ll discover all of this and more on your own, if you’d like a quick gut check before reading any further, I have a thought experiment for you. Gentleness as a concept has historically been given short shrift – at the time I’m writing this, there is only one philosophical work (originally written in French) and no personal growth books out there devoted to the subject – I can only point you to your own life experience to determine the power of gentleness. So, instead of looking at gentleness itself, we must look to the places where gentleness is absent. And what is the opposite of gentle? Harsh.
You don’t need a dictionary to understand what it means to speak harshly, be harsh, embody harshness. Now, ask yourself: Do you like being treated harshly? Are the values and principles you want to embody supported by harshness? Would you want to teach your children to behave harshly? Do your religious or philosophical models – Jesus Christ, the Buddha – advocate harshness?
You get the point. It goes without saying that we gravitate toward gentleness and avoid harshness. But because we are so drawn to gentleness, it has become invisible. It’s so clear that we prefer gentle to harsh that most of us don’t spend any time thinking about gentleness at all, let alone thinking about how to cultivate it in our own lives. And this is as true for us on a personal level as it is on a societal one. For centuries, we’ve created systems to train our intellect, our scientific knowledge base, and our economic and physical power. When we look around the planet, we can see advancement in all these areas. Yet most of us have never experienced life that is so uncertain, so divided, and so full of anger, violence, mistrust, and hopelessness. Cultivating gentleness will not solve our own personal or our societal and planetary problems overnight, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.
Now, I’m no different than you. I probably wouldn’t have thought about gentleness either had my life and the world been a little different. But my life and the world went the way they did. And in the early spring of 2020, like most people who lived through the dark and frightening days of the early covid pandemic, I felt isolated, unmoored and a little sad. And then the word “gentleness” floated into my head. It was odd and I ignored the thought at first, but as the days of February blended into the days of March, the idea of gentleness started to have appeal. I had time on my hands and nowhere to go, so I decided to try something I had never tried before: to be gentle with myself while trying to reach a goal. This initial experiment inspired me to spend the next two years applying gentleness to pretty much everything in my life and then to dedicate a newsletter to the subject. I’m not going to pretend that it was easy or that I am always successful, but it became clear to me that the more I cultivated gentleness the less overwhelmed, anxious, and angry I was. I also found myself reconnecting to the person I actually wanted to be. Life became lighter, brighter, and more fun. I was laughing more than I had in years.
And then I noticed that people in my life responded to me differently, too. The results of one early experiment with emails and texts was so dramatic that the practice became part of my life right then and has stayed with me all these years later: Whenever I send an email or text, I wait to write and press send until I feel a gentle warm-heartedness for the person who will be receiving the note. It doesn’t matter who I’m writing or what I’m writing about. There was an IRS representative I contacted about paying my father’s back taxes (not an inherently fun task), a refrigerator repair technician, a family member who is, eh-hem, challenging for me. In each case, sensing gentleness reminded me of our shared humanity, which not only transformed how and what I wrote, but also how that message was received. And, in case you’re wondering, the IRS agent went out of her way to be helpful.
If any of this resonates, then please join us in the quiet revolution to live more gently. This year, I’ll be sharing weekly practices intended to cultivate gentleness in every aspect of life. If you want a preview, please subscribe (for free!) at https://alisonvonr.substack.com/. You can follow along every week, but if that doesn’t make sense for you, there’s absolutely no need to do it that way. While the practices build on each other, there will be synergies no matter how you put them together. Some practices will just click. After you spend one week, you may find the improvement so dramatic that it’s nonsensical to stop. Others may take more time to establish, and you’ll find yourself re-committing to them when you notice that your life is better with them than without. And, finally, some practices are designed for specific purposes, and you will rely on them only when that specific need arises. As with everything I’m offering here, take what serves and leave the rest. Plus, I’m including a “Further Inspiration” section for each topic to share the thinkers who help me to live more gently. (Bonus tip: most of the current writers have podcasts, YouTube channels and TED Talks, so no worries if the thought of sitting down to a thick tome is not your thing. You can always listen or watch.)
warmest wishes,
alison
