By Amanda Knox

I don’t know how old I was exactly, but I was as old as you are when you stand eye-level with the kitchen counter. All the neighborhood kids were gathered in my backyard and we were playing pretend. In this game, I was a cat that bestowed wisdom and favor from my lazy yet daring perch atop the swingset. It must have been late afternoon, because I was hungry and assumed everyone else was hungry too. Without further ado, I found Mom in the kitchen and asked, “Mom, can I make everyone peanut butter sandwiches?”

She was standing at the kitchen sink, looking out at the backyard through the window, and there was a moment before she responded, as if she were entranced. From my kitchen-counter angle, all I could see of her view were the first orange hues in the sky. Finally she turned to me and said, “I’m glad you thought to do that. Of all the things I wish for you to become, I wish that you be kind.”

My memory of the encounter ends there, perhaps because Mom’s words had such a profound impact on me. It was the first time I remember her saying anything that I carried with me as a take-away, except perhaps all the times she said, “I love you.” Something had shifted. It was like she had told me something important about myself that I both knew all along and had never recognized before. That feeling of wanting to be nice to other people, she told me that could be purposeful. Furthermore, I could define myself. With kindness.

I’ve tried to keep the word close ever since then, as a fallback. When in doubt, kindness. It was my word, like a secret name, and it has served me well. I want to be treated kindly by others, so I try to pay kindness back and forward. Give an extra hug. Listen through the silence that comes after words. Forgive and let go. Be first to open the door, buy the coffee, make the peanut butter sandwiches. I learned that there is no starvation economy in the exchange of kindness, in the giving and receiving of the intangible. The outcome has been that I have around me a thick and ever-expanding nest of kind-hearted friends and family.

This year, I celebrated the New Year by staying up until three o’clock in the morning playing boardgames with a small group of new friends. We didn’t talk New Year’s resolutions, but one person did ask, “So what’s everyone’s word for the year?”

“You mean, like a mantra?” I asked. “Like, I think I can, I think I can…?”

“Yeah, or, just a word,” he replied.

Everyone murmured and mumbled, working it out. A few qualifiers came to be of assistance. The word should be a guide and a goal, a means and an end. It should be a natural extension of the progress you’ve made up to this point, an action/idea that is born of your current context that you carry and will carry you forward. Diligence, said one. Peace, affirmed another.

I felt like a spotlight had been inadvertently shined onto my inner world, onto my kindness. The word was on the tip of my tongue, but then the proposition of articulating it made me realize that the word driving me forward these days was something a little different. Kindness by now felt like an unconscious part of me. I had moved on to other doubts that I needed to address.

I realized that the greatest obstacle in my adult life has been fear. Fear because I care about how I influence the world around me. Fear because I am a young adult, but not so young, and the shape of my future depends on the foundations I lay in the present. Fear because freedom and self-actualization have not until the past year felt so real and so overwhelming.

I needed a new word.

Around the table, it was my turn. “Courage,” I said.

“Good one,” they said.