Kindness: The Freedom of Softening the Gaze

 

Kindness feels as if it comes from the world, but it begins in the way we look. 

The moment we soften our gaze, the harsh inner judge becomes quiet, and life seems to respond in the same tone. A gentle look invites a gentle world. It is almost alchemical. The inside shifts, and the outside echoes that shift.

Communities built around kindness, whether religious, fraternal, or simply groups of friends, create a sense of protection. It is a vital illusion. While we ultimately navigate life alone, because we are always incomplete and always lacking something that cannot be recovered, these fictions of companionship and care keep us from sinking. They do not remove our solitude, but they give it a warmer shape.

A few weeks ago I experienced a moment of clarity. In a single day, like in a Jungian synchronisation dream, three unexpected gifts came to me from people I barely knew. Two pairs of shoes, a cleaning product, and an extra plate of nachos at the restaurant. All free. The gifts were small, but the feeling was enormous. For days I felt as if the world had placed a soft hand on my shoulder. I walked as someone lifted by an unseen current of goodwill. Everything in my life that needed improvement no longer mattered. Everything felt as if it was going to be fine.

Those who radiate kindness most naturally often grew up with emotional stability. A father who offered limits without violence. A mother whose gaze allowed space instead of swallowing it. These early structures build a self that is not afraid to give. The rest of us, who come from dysfunctional families, have to learn later. We learn through mistakes, through analysis, through repairing what was never formed. This learning becomes a rebuilding of the inner world, a quiet reconstruction of the symbolic house we inhabit.

When we pay attention to moments like these and feel grateful for them no matter how tiny they are, something important shifts. The weather matters less. Money matters less. The body problems matters less. Gratitude rearranges the weight of things. Problems do not vanish, but they loosen their grip.

The decision to perceive kindness makes our wounds feel lighter, as if their edges have softened.

This movement touches something spiritual. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said love the other as yourself. The Buddha taught that compassion opens the path to freedom. Rumi said "be a lamp or a lifeboat or a ladder". Epictetus reminded us that people act as they believe they must, and so we must meet them with gentleness. Different languages, one movement of the soul. When your gaze becomes kind toward others, it becomes kind toward yourself. The wound becomes a companion instead of an enemy.

Kindness heals not by closing wounds but by changing their meaning. 

It tells us that lack is not shame. It teaches us that we can give without owning, care without controlling, and receive without bargaining. A kind gaze is a liberation of the inner field. It keeps us moving. It keeps us open. It keeps us alive.

But what is it, exactly, that we are being liberated from? To answer that, we must turn to the concept of the Big Other.

Jacques Lacan, that enigmatic French psychoanalyst who saw desire where others saw logic, proposed that much of what we believe to be our own choices is dictated by something he called the Other, the symbolic order that surrounds us, speaks through us, and quietly shapes the way we live. I prefer to call it the Big Other, because it feels vast, diffuse, and powerful, like an invisible social atmosphere we breathe without realizing it.

The Big Other is not a person. It is an abstract entity that exists in language, culture, and expectation. It tells you what is normal, what is good, what is success, what is failure. It decides far more than we want to admit, from your favourite food to your sense of identity to your choice of career. And the strangest part is that it does all this unconsciously. We obey without knowing we are obeying.

Lacan argued that the task of psychoanalysis is not to destroy the Big Other, because stepping entirely outside language and culture is impossible, but to make its laws visible, to reveal the grammar of our unconscious life. Once those hidden rules are exposed, we can begin to act with a little more awareness and a little less servitude.

We cannot escape the Big Other, but we can reduce it. 

That is where philosophy becomes practical. Reducing its influence is not about rebellion or cutting ties with your culture. It means learning to distinguish between what truly belongs to you and what is merely inherited. It means asking what you genuinely want, versus what you have been taught to want.

For some, this reduction begins by abandoning superstition, no longer reading omens in coincidences or surrendering decisions to fate. For others, it means gently questioning parental expectations or cultural scripts that once felt sacred. The idea is to shrink the territory of the Big Other within the mind, reclaiming a little more symbolic space of your own.

This is not liberation in a heroic sense. It is not the slaying of a monster. It is more like tuning a radio. The Big Other will always hum in the background, but you can adjust the volume, filter out the noise, and listen more clearly to your own frequency.

That may be the real work of freedom. Not to live without the Big Other, but to live with it consciously. Once you see the strings, you can dance differently.

When we soften our gaze, when we direct it toward the small good things we receive every day and feel grateful for them, we loosen the power of the imagined authority that judges us. In that moment we act not from fear of the symbolic law but from our own desire. Kindness becomes an act of freedom rather than obedience, and the world becomes a meeting place rather than a courtroom.

This is where the next chapter of your life can begin.