Holidays are times of great loving and loneliness and we often don’t know who is experiencing which. For many it is a bit of both.

For us all this can be a prime time for kindness, sometimes by sharing what we have.

And kindness is often unspoken. “An eye can threaten like a loaded and leveled gun, or it can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance for joy,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. At another time, Emerson wrote, “You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”

“You may be sorry that you spoke, sorry you stayed or went, sorry you won or lost, sorry so much was spent. But as you go through life, you’ll find—you’re never sorry that you were kind,” said Herbert Prochnow. There’s a French proverb on the wall of my study, “Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.”

Authentic praise is an extension of kindness. Whatever we praise we encourage to flourish. Whatever we criticize or “simply” snub goes deeper and lasts longer.

Each moment we choose our emotional response. We choose where to put our attention, emotion, and intention. Emotions are energy. So, look to someone’s positive intent, especially when it appears she may have none.

Even though after his death his wife probably disagreed with how he displayed some of his “kindness” on the road, Charles Kuralt wrote, “The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.”

“Keep what is worth keeping. And with the breath of kindness blow the rest away,” suggests English novelist, Dinah Mulock Craik. Here’s to making more opportunities to play, laugh, celebrate, and act together in cultivating kindness as life’s genuine “keeper.”

Life contains few absolutes, and one of those few is that kindness usually cultivates connection, something we yearn for in a time-pressed, ear-to-the- cell-phone, relationship-diminished culture. After all, the heart can be our strongest muscle if we exercise it regularly. Yet being kind is not a guarantee of safety from hurt — nothing offers that fail-safe comfort.

“Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships,” wrote Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in an article for McCall’s magazine way back in 1975.

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares,” wrote Henri Nouwen in Out of Solitude.

Years ago from my college classmate, Alasi Perdanan, I heard a Persian proverb, “With a sweet tongue of kindness, you can drag an elephant by a hair.”

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate,” wrote Albert Schweitzer. “He who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love,” wrote the Greek religious leader, Saint Basil.

“Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom,” wrote Theodore Isaac Rubin in “One to One.”

“Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness and small obligations win and preserve the heart” said English chemist Humphrey Davy.

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop that makes it run over.

So in a series of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over,” once wrote the Scottish lawyer and biographer, James Boswell.

“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck . . . But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness,” wrote columnist Ellen Goodman.

From an artist’s perspective, ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov once said, “The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.”

Willa Cather believed that “When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason has left them.”

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution, “Kahlil Gibran reminds us.

Ultimately, “kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not,” noted Dr. Samuel Johnson. Albeit unevenly, this holiday, I am attempting to practice giving what may be the most nourishing and priceless present and by now you can probably guess what that is.

Your thoughts on this?

Partners – romantic and otherwise – tend to fight when one feels neglected or threatened. When Peter Bregman’s wife yelled from two rooms away, “at least pack the shampoo” she was feeling neglected.

Recognizing which underlying feeling is being evoked helps you know how to resolve the conflict. So discovered psychology professor Keith Sanford.

Which one is your hot button? Find out here.

When one feels threatened he sees his partner as critical, blaming, hostile or controlling. When one feels neglected it is because she perceives her partner as failing to contribute sufficiently to the relationship.

Sanford’s research shows it helps to talk about neglect yet discussing a perceived threat may not be helpful.

Sanford’s advice for being happy in love also make sense for any successful partnership or other collaboration: “For the most part, successful couples avoid letting fights get too heated. Specifically, they go easy on the four classic negative fighting tactics:

1. Criticism
2. Stonewalling
3. Contempt
4. Defensiveness

The famed marriage researcher John Gottman calls them the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ because they can spell doom for a marriage when used too frequently.”

I can’t help but add that Gottman, “found one factor that was the best predictor of all. This was a positive predictor, one that predicted long-term success rather than failure in marriage.

Gottman found that marriages are likely to thrive when the man was willing to be influenced by his wife.” (Gentlemen – want to win points with the women in your life? Comment positively about this finding.)

Sanford’s further advice for couples also seems helpful for non—romantic relationships: “Happy couples resort to negative tactics too, Sanford says, but only sparingly.

When they do bring up hurt, anger, and other negative emotions, they often balance them out with a constructive approach. In the best-case scenarios, couples use conflicts as a time to express concerns and share emotions. Instead of telling his partner ‘you make me sick,’ a man could try saying something like ‘It hurt me when you called me lazy.’

Shifting the conversation away from the partner’s faults and towards one’s own feelings is a tried-and-true way to defuse even the most intense conflicts.”

Something in yesterday’s “Modern Love“ column struck me as ringing true, not only for enduring marriages but for flourishing friendships, “Being single is all about the future, about the person you’re going to meet at Starbucks or after answering the next scientific compatibility questionnaire. Being married, after a certain point, is about the past, about a steadily growing history of moments that provide a confidence of comfort, an asset that compounds over time.”  

Perhaps friendships also compound with our attentive interest over time.

Holidays are poignant anyway. Why not use the emotions that arise to deepen your relationships?  Choose the role you want to play in other’s lives, rather than fall into the one you are expected to play.

Inevitably we will disappoint each other at times.  The key however to satisfying, enduring friendships or marriage is not obvious. In fact it is often baffling.

We are most likely to assume the secret to friendship is how often we are happy in the company of friends as compared to the moments they disappoint us.

Yet if we want to keep and cultivate that valued relationship  - and be happier in it – here’s some seldom-discussed habits to practice. Some go against the grain of our instinctive behavior and I confess I am not adept at them.  But they are well worth practicing and there’s no better time than this holiday. Inevitably as we gather or call each other or exchange emails, we are contemplating our family and friends and the roles we play in each other’s lives. 

To bring your friends closer and enjoy them more, consider altering your role in their lives.  In fact, create new scenes to create the storyline you want to live for the rest of your life.

Here’s three ways to bring out the best side of the main characters who most matter to you and increase your mutual appreciation of each other. 

1. Focus on their strongest talent and temperament

Praise friends when they are displaying their strengths. Give them slack when they aren’t, as Gretchen Rubin suggests in The Happiness Project.  In practicing genuine praise, in the moment, you’ll feel become less reactive and they’ll feel safer and accepted.  That attitude and action paves the road to reciprocal praise behavior and to greater closeness. 

2. Practice the Golden Golden Rule

Rather than doing unto others as you would have done unto you, step outside yourself. Instead do unto others as they would have done unto them.  Act and speak to support them in the ways they most need and value, not the ways that most matter to you.

One of the most precious ways is to show appreciation for the ways they are better than you. For example, David Sarasohn notes, “I am somewhat better with words than my wife is; she is infinitely better with people. In different ways, we translate each other to the rest of the world, and admire each other’s contrasting language skills. Being married to someone you respect for being somehow better than you keeps affection alive. That this impressive person chooses you year after year makes you more pleased with yourself, fueling the kind of mutual self-esteem that can get you through decades.”

3. Cultivate a Positive Attribution Bias

Notice how often you smile, praise, and give slack as compared to taking umbrage, making an abrupt, hurt or hostile face or sharply commenting back when you feel you have not been well-treated. (I find this terribly hard to do yet am working on it.)

Here’s why this is so powerful.

If happy couples who stay together have a high ratio of positive to negative interactions with each other it seems likely that behavior among friends would yield the same result.  In short, when a valued friend does something that jars you assume the best of intentions.  Here’s the payoff.  In a study people were asked, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you cannot be too careful in dealing with people?” Your answer reflects the strength of your relationships.

Couples are more likely to divorce when they:

• Are more likely to attribute the good things in their lives together to their partner’s selfish motivations. of their partner. “He’s cleaning the house just to butter me up for his fishing weekend with his buddies.”

• Blame their problems and daily hassles on their partners. “If she’d stop nagging me about reviewing our bills we’d have more fun on weekends.” 

Couples are happier and more likely to stay together when:

• Generously give credit to their partner for things that happen.

• See hidden virtues accompanying their partner’s foibles and faults.

Ironically this “assume the best” trusting behavior even affects countries, discovered Dacher Keltner, author of Born to Be Good. The lower the test level in the country the less likely it is doing well economically.

Looking for the good part in someone’s behavior is what Confucius believed was a way of making life meaningful for oneself and those in one’s life. He called this practicing “jen.”  As Keltner describes it, “A person of jen, wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others. A person of jen brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion. Jen is felt in that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness in others.”

3. Spend face time with each other.  Regularly.

Not just over this holiday. Nothing reveals values as much as how you spend your time. Stay in contact in other ways when you are not nearby. With familiarity one reduces the chance of Attribution Bias. When your friend hogs the dinner conversation, talking about his difficult boss you have enough experiences with him to know that he needs to vent, wants concrete advice and is a good sounding board for you when the situation is reversed.  In short, he has put emotional deposits in the bank of your friendship.  You don’t make the Attribution Bias of mistaking his volubility with self-centeredness.

“The more moments we share the more comfort grows,” wrote David Sarasohn.

Bottom Line:  We know we are each capable of great good and evil and many everyday acts in between.

Yet where will you put your attention this holiday? Consider the Indian story of the two wolves inside of you. One can focus on the selfishness in friends and family members or the good. Whatever you focus on you will see more of around you.  See greed and selfishness? That’s what you’ll expect. Look for moments of generosity and selflessness. That’s what you’ll reflect back – and increase the chances that you will experience more – with others. 

Such practice is not as easy as buying gifts yet it may be the most precious present we can give those we cherish and hope to bring closer – and enjoy ourselves. As Jonathan Haidt reminds us. “For most of us relationships are the surest route to happiness.”

Thank you all for the thoughtful, kind and generous comments, emails, calls and other ways of reaching out and friendship throughout this year. Here’s to our practicing our kindest roles with and for each other in what promises to be a volatile 2010 where friendship can make all the difference. Light your candle to glow on your friends. Together we’ll cast a brighter glow on the good and reinforce that behavior in each other.

Even when blindfolded, when touched just fleetingly we often recognize the emotion behind it. Even when touched by a stranger. Those touched in the study could identify the emotion (from eight, ranging from disgust to sympathy) more often than could happen by chance. Yet they were touched just five seconds.

More surprising to me, is that we are more likely to guess the right emotion that’s being expressed by someone’s touch than we can by hearing their voice or seeing their facial expression.  

These three findings may startle you too:

• Men tended to avoid touching the face “and then only to express

 anger or disgust at women and sympathy for other men.

•  Women touched faces frequently to express anger, sadness and disgust for both (genders) “and to convey fear and happiness to men.”

We have a deep hunger human contact. Touch is the most direct, visceral path of contact with one another.

Yet Americans are among the most touch-adverse of all cultures, except with our closest family and friends.

In fact, increasingly schools have formal a Hands Off policy. “Even high-fiving and pats on the back have been outlawed” so we can protect youth from violence. The lesson, learned at an early age, is that adults would rather protect them from a problem (bullying and other violence) than help them with an opportunity (closeness and friendship). It’s easier to manage.

I can’t help but wonder if this cultural phobia is connected to the rise in loneliness. This is worth closer study as loneliness may be as dangerous to one’s health as smoking.  

Even smiling keeps us better connected with each other. In fact, just from looking at a yearbook photo, one can predict with some accuracy whether a person will divorce later in life,” claims Matthew Hertenstein, Director of the Touch and Emotion Lab at DePauw University.

But let’s end on an up note.

“Men soothe their loneliness with computers, women do it with pets,” says the co-author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, John Cacioppo. In addition to his loneliness-relieving “make friends” tips why not literally get in touch more often every day? 

Mind you, I still get itchy just thinking about popular Leo Buscaglia’s well-intended notion that we should greet everyone with a bear hug, including strangers. (“You can’t wrap love in a box, but you can wrap a person in a hug.“) Hugging everyone one meets negates the notion of touch having special meaning.

Yet why not hug your friends – and those to whom you are instinctively drawn? Shake hands with a smile when greeting colleagues.

As my Dad says, you seldom know if this time will be the last time you see that person. 

Let’s stay in touch.

Women are “leaving the door open for a guy to get away with something…Here’s what’s happened over the years,” says comic and radio host Steve Harvey. “Women’s standards and requirements have lowered over the years. And as men, we know that. We have taken advantage of it. We’ve created terms that we feed to women that allow us to exist as we do,” he told Belinda Luscome when discussing his New York Times best seller, co-authored with Denene Millner, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. For example, Harvey said (and I’m abbreviating) …

1. We created the term “nagging.” There’s really no such

 thing as nagging. As soon as a woman starts registering her complaint, we call it nagging. We let you know it will drive us away. 

2. When you first meet a man, so you don’t ask a lot of personal questions, and questions about his business, we created the term gold-digger. Now why would a woman not be concerned about her financial future?

3. Three things men want from women: support, loyalty and “the cookie” (sex): “We’ll take a lot of things from a woman. But we have to have these three things. You take away any one of them, you lose a man’s affection.”

4. Three ways men show love to women: profess, provide and protect: “We have to define love in some kind of way. The problem with women is they have this great spectrum of what love is, and they want it reciprocated the same way they give it out. But we men can only nurture to a certain degree. It’s not in our DNA … We want to profess our love. We tell everyone,” he told an Atlanta audience.

5. “Men are driven by who they are, what they do, and how much they make. … These three things make up the basic DNA of manhood–the three accomplishments every man must achieve before he feels like he’s truly fulfilled his destiny as a man…, and until he’s achieved his goal in those three areas, the man you’re dating, committed to, or married to will be too busy to focus on you” Harvey wrote in the book.

“I’ve had two divorces myself. I understand. What I was never able to convey until I got a little older was why I was missing in action… trying so hard to be somebody … not as emotionally involved,” says Harvey who adds that he “could have written it (his book) in “about 35 pages…. because we’re guys. We are that simple,” he added in the interview.

Sometimes Harvey he sounds like he’s offering 1950s Mad Men-era advice, yet not as much as Whitey Casey in The Man Plan. It gets men nodding and some women giving heated responses to him on call-in talk shows:

• Take your husbands last name. It supports men’s desire to protect women.

• Men still expect women to keep a clean home.

• It is ok if women don’t know how to cook as long as they “cook” in the bedroom.

Three things to ask a man “to decide if he is worth keeping”, suggests Harvey, are (and these are just as valuable in reverse for men to ask women) are his:

1.  Short-term goals and whether they match his long-term goals.

2.  Views on family and kids.

3. Relationship with his mom

I would add:

4. Relationship to his friends

5. Views on money, especially on spending and saving.

6. Strongest values: what most matters to him in character traits and behavior.

Here’s to living a greater life and accomplishing greater things together than we can on our own:

“It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own. “  ~ Joyce Carol Oates

 “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung

“We judge others by their acts, but ourselves by our intentions.” ~ American proverb

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction then both are changed.” ~ Carl Jung

“Mutual understanding and the human touch are in inverse relationship to frequency of encounter and kinship.” ~ Yi Tuan

“A true leader is not one you look up to because they are the best. A true leader is one that draws the best out in you.” ~ Anne Warfield

“A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.” ~ Henrik Warfield

“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.”  ~ anonymous

“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ~ Samuel Johnson

“You can’t stay mad at somebody who makes you laugh.” ~ Jay Leno

“In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.” ~ Blaise Pascal

“In the religion of love to pray is to pass, by a single word, into the inner chamber of the other.” ~ Galway Kinnell

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.” ~ Victor Hugo 

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.” ~ James Arthur Baldwin

“Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion.” ~ Dwight Macdonald

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne “All value resides in individuals. Value is distributed in individual space. Relalationship economic is the framework for wealth creation.  Deep support is the new metaproduct. ~ Shshanna Zuboff 

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.” ~ Victor Hugo

“We didn’t come over on the same ship, but were all in the same boat.” ~ Bernard M. Baruch

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, I was wrong.” ~ Sydney J. Harris

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies…” ~ Tom Paine

“Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” ~ Chief Seattle

“Many candles can be kindled from one candle without diminishing it.” ~ The Midrash

A bus driver guides the elderly woman off the bus to an unfamiliar restaurant where  she’s meeting friends, then hears her tell him why that day and his help touched her. A teenager confesses her cutting became addictive and how her love of her mother and best friend helps her get by.  

Over 23,000 people have sat down in a booth with a simple recorder and a volunteer – ready to tell a life-changing story, to declare their love, acknowledge their regret and more.

At the Story Corp they opened up because someone was ready to listen.  As founder, Dave Isay says, “Listening is an Act of Love.”  “The stories explode 

off the page” admits Isay in his interview today on public radio – my station is KQED. 

This is the first ever National Day of Listening – another Story Corps-generated idea. Today we are asked to spend an hour asking a loved one about their life. Don’t be one of those who says later on, “I only wish I had asked my mother and father to tell their stories – and share my story about them.” 

Unexpected memories flood back as one sits in a booth for 40 minutes, with someone there just to listen to you. “What was the happiest moment of your life?” “What are you most proud of?”  “How do you want to be remembered?”

I didn’t wait for Story Corp to come to Sausalito. Over the past four years I’ve sat several times, small Olympus recorder in hand, at my dining room table with the view of Angel Island in Richardson Bay and asked my parents to tell me about growing up, falling in love, raising us four children – and what they most believe in and why.  We continue these conversations sitting in their living room in Portland, looking out at the giant sequoias – the “old growth like us” my Dad observes dryly.  

One story I’ve heard since childhood still chokes me up. While soldiers in World War II Dad and his brother Harold, stationed thousand miles apart in the U.S., went AWOL. They were to be sent overseas shortly. From letters  my grandmother wrote to them, they located each other and somehow agreed to meet in a cafe in a small town, located mid-distance between them.  Dad came first and waited several hours, drinking several cups of coffee and eating a grilled cheese.  But when Harold walked in and sat down they mostly talked about small things. The cherries their mom was canning, the songs their sister was playing on the piano for their Lutheran church’s Christmas service, combat training.

Knowing they might not see each other again, they synchronized their watches and made a plan in their usual, logical way.  At precisely 2:00 pm, they would rise from the table, walk out the door, one turning left and the other right. 

You can have a temporary listening booth in your library, company cafeteria, synagogue, museum, school  - or other place where people can walk in, sit down and tell a story that has stuck in their mind over the years.  Bring a family member or friend.  Volunteer to hear and record stories for a couple of hours. 

A Story Corp booth has just been installed across the water in San Francisco at the beautiful new Contemporary Jewish Museum – a place dedicated to offering art and culture to the whole community. How apt a place to listen and to be heard as we mourn for the rabbi, his wife and over 100 others who were killed this week in Mumbai.

 Listening with friends, tears come to our eyes as we hear individuals tell stories that remain fresh in their mind years after they happened. 

 Continue to give thanks by listening because, as Issay reminds us, “Every life matters.” In this faltering economy why not create a priceless, heirloom gift for your loved ones?