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Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.

Not being anxious requires a level of humility, doesn't it? It does, I think. It's not all about you.

Once you know the emotional building blocks of anxiety, you can influence them.

It really shocks me when I encounter people who think kindness doesn't matter. Because I think it's pretty much the only thing that matters.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

Sometimes people don't trust the force of kindness. They think love or compassion or kindness will make you weak and kind of stupid and people will take advantage of you; you won't stand up for other people.

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.

In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities.