It is Mental Health Awareness Week and the theme is kindness. Although it is really strange for me to live this new Western life and celebrate the obvious, why not? Let me embrace whatever resonates with any cell of goodness in my heart.

The first story that came to my mind this morning is the summer of 2017. I moved to London in May and I didn't know anyone here. My husband has some family members here, but we didn't and don't really socialise with them.

Being warm bloodied Croatian and just arriving from 10-year experience of living full-time in a small Buddhist community in the south of France, I felt quite depressed and really down. I saw some posts about #OurParks and immediately joined the free classes in the local park. For people who don't know Lloyd's park, it is an oasis in Walthamstow, situated just behind beautiful William Morris Gallery.There were two people who right on felt compassion towards me even without me talking extensively about my situation. They extended their kindness unreservedly to offer me their friendship, the introduction to their families and their business partners and employers as I didn't have a job at that moment.That warm feeling when someone is so kind to you at the first meeting, that is something I never forget and for me, it is an eternal promise to be there for them always, no matter what. Maybe it is a Balkan thing, maybe not. I remember so many kind people all over the world who were spontaneously kind.

My friends Esther and Mona are among those beings who do what they can, whomever they encounter, sharing whatever their hearts and hands have a hold of. My friend Sandra, now living in Venezuela, is someone I met on a whale watching trip in Baja California in the late 90s. We just clicked, exchanged numbers and it was her whom I first called when months after I decided to move out and separate from my husband. She offered me her studio on the campus, as she was a professor at UCSD the very same night and she moved to a friend. She didn't know me at all. We had a small chit-chat on a touristy trip! 

The spring 2018 Esther would experience one of the greatest tragedies one can be a part of- her son got shot dead near the Tesco shop on the Forest Road, not far away from where we met and where she lived. Two years have passed now.

Mona's 85-year-old mum cooked healing food for my mum when she visited me last May and fell ill. The orchid her sister Harsha brought is still here, manifesting the beauty of that kindness. I am so touched and so devoted to my friends and their generosity, their compassion in action. I want to celebrate their existence.

Share your story, inspire the cells in my body and soul with your honouring of the kindness, the virtue like none other.