Kind words, straight from the heart, are so easy to speak. Being kind to others is the best way to be good to yourself.

"Happiness is not so much in having as sharing," said Norman MacEwan. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."

Written Japanese is complicated and requires 2,000 characters and is a blend of three writing systems: Kanji, which is the idea of the word rather than its sound, and hiragana and katakana, where the characters represent the spoken sounds.

Kanji, more complex than hiragana or katakana, was imported in the 5th century from China via Korea.  Before then,  Japanese was strictly a spoken language.

Conversational Japanese, futsuu-tai (plain-form), differs from the more formal language, teenee-tai (masu-form) learned in school.

In any language, kindness matters. And when languages meet... say English and Japanese... magic occurs.

As Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton observed: "When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond."

Kind words matter so much: please use them.