Hello coffee loves and avid readers! Welcome to Olive’s School at Olive’s Café, where you explore life lessons told by great Grandpa Aesop. Here’s the quote from Aesop’s fables:
One winter a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion on it, and taking it up, placing it in his bottom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and resuming its natural instincts, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”
The greatest kindness will not bind with the ungrateful.
Aesop, 6th century B.C.
After reading this quote, I thought about how kindness truly works. When I thought about it, I realized that you can’t really expect people to be grateful for your kindness. Some people condition themselves to be “nasty” because of how they grew up and their experience (as I was told). Others, well, they just don’t care. They feel entitled to receive all the kindness the world has to offer, and believe that they don’t owe anything. And, to be honest, they’re right.
However, that doesn’t mean you stop being kind to others. Kindness is a gift that rarely anyone has, and it’s a mutation. For instance, not everyone can roll their tongues to look like a taco. Some people can do that, so it’s already in their genes. So is kindness, and kindness is not usually taught. Sure, tell your family and friends to be kind, but can you teach them how? If it’s not in them, don’t waste your time.
In my experience, I learned how to be kind when I saw that being mean would only end up hurting me. Kindness makes me feel better, and I like to see people happy. Before, I expected people to be thankful for my kindness. I would get upset when I didn’t get anything in return. Now, I don’t really care. I carry on being kind and go on about my day. However, I am also learning to be very careful with who I’m being kind to. You won’t really know who the snake in your life is until you do something kind for them. If you’re unsure, look at their patterns. If anyone acts kind to you, don’t be the snake, either. It’ll hurt…
Remember, the next time you invite someone into anything, out of kindness, be careful and be aware of what you’re getting into, and you may never know; you’ll remember to not let the same act again. However, don’t stop being kind, because it’s very rewarding at the end.
Thanks for tuning in on Olive’s School of Life at Olive’s Café!
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I’ll admit, I think I’ve been both the snake and the farmer in my life. Sometimes we can’t help being the snake, I think it comes from being in a desperate situation, you’re thinking too much about your situation that you don’t bother to think about others, especially the one whose helped you.
When my family got evicted from our house 6 years ago, we had nowhere to stay. I was actually considering a home shelter but apparently, those are dangerous and they aren’t the best situation to live in. Kind of unhealthy. At least that’s what I heard. They had given us a pamphlet on where to go and apparently, a lot of druggies live there… idk. I should probably learn more about it since I almost came to be in that situation. In any case, my brother who was in a much more sound mind at the time since he wasn’t there when the police kicked us out has suggested we go to our aunt and uncle. I didn’t want to. I was so embarrassed. But we went and visited our uncle who worked at Florida Atlantic University in Boca as a Mechanical Engineer Professor I believe. Suffice to say he wasn’t happy about our situation, but tried to help as much as he could. He worked and looked for a house for us while letting us stay at his home. There was a lot of yelling and blaming. I feel terrible for how I treated my parents due to the blaming, so there’s the incident where I was the snake. And then there’s also how we broke contact with our aunt and uncle after they helped us. To be fair to my parents, they were pretty rude to them by humiliating them in from of my brother and me and blaming them for losing their own house, as if that’s what they needed but… we should’ve maintained contact or showed our gratitude someway. Instead, it kind of feels like we used them, or perhaps they felt obligated to helping us because turning us away would make them feel like awful people. Not to mention that we were family. So in any case, they will go to Jannah (that’s the Muslim word for Heaven, or Garden of Eden but basically it means Paradise) for what they did.
I think in the world we live practicing kindness is very important so thank you for this reminder, Olive. We also need to practice gratefulness too but I think practicing kindness will make us be aware of being grateful for the kindness given…
Wow these stories are really getting a lot of personal stuff out of me…haha
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