As we finish the semester, we are also finishing a very holy season in many of our religious calendars. Last week was both Holy Week for our Christian community and Passover for our Jewish community. Earlier this month our Muslim community marked the end of Ramadan with Eid Al-Fitr. Late last month marked Nowruz – the Baha’i and Zoroastrian New Year. Our Hindu community celebrated Holi on campus on Saturday and will be celebrating the end of the semester with a Saraswati puja on Wednesday. Buddha’s birthday will be celebrated in a few weeks. The Sikh celebration of Vaisakhi also happened last week. Our office has been quite busy! Many of these holy days revolve around the idea of hope, hope that this world can and will be a better and more loving place. Some days it feels like this hope is hard very hard to hold. This morning as I was reflecting on the life and incredible legacy of Pope Francis, I was reminded about the importance of kindness in holding hope. In December on BBC’s thought of the day Pope Francis shared a message on hope and kindness, also emphasizing the importance of humility. “A world full of hope and kindness is a more beautiful world. A society that looks to the future with confidence and treats people with respect and empathy is more humane.” This reminds me that every day we are faced with moments in which we can choose to be kind or unkind. We have the choice in every action we take or comment we make to choose a path of kindness. At times this goes against our first instinct, when we are surrounded by or greeted by harshness or cruelty it can be natural to respond in the same way. But each of us has a thousand opportunities a day to change our response and to move to a place of kindness, mercy and compassion. There is much we cannot control in the world but when we operate in our daily lives with kindness, we are living out a belief and hope that our world can be a more humane place and a better future is ahead.