Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski are the authors of “When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids.” Dana Winters is executive director of the Fred Rogers Center. Maureen Frew is a teacher in the Avonworth School District and co-founder of JAMbethekindkid Inc.

In March 2020, when the world seemed to stand still, a group of neighbors in Dormont took to their porches and lawns. Donning wool hats and winter coats (and the obligatory black-and-gold jersey or two), they started to sing in unison.

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor … ”

The Fred Rogers classic fit the moment perfectly. Not only did it put us in mind of Pittsburgh’s favorite neighbor, it embodied the neighborliness we’d witnessed worldwide: the nightly cheering for health care workers, the car parades for children, the hordes who stayed home to protect our most vulnerable and most essential. Amid a deadly, dangerous disease, scenes like these kept us tethered to what’s best: our human capacity for kindness.

Today, most of those tethers have snapped. We don’t clap for health care workers anymore — we exhaust them. Remember ordering takeout to keep our favorite restaurants afloat? Some of them shut down anyway, not for a lack of business but a lack of kindness instead. From roads to retail, the pain and frustration of the past 18 months has surfaced, again and again, as casual cruelty and deep distrust.

And it seems to be getting worse. The delta variant’s arrival has been “a kind of breaking point for many of us,” writes Dr. Jean Kim, assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. “It coincides also with the already anxiety-ridden return to schools for children and other reopenings. The general vibe is one of revisited horror and fatigue … stress and anger are everywhere.”

We all see the problem. But it’s hard to know what to do about it, aside from shaking our heads and mournfully missing Fred Rogers. If only he were here, we say. If only we — his real-life neighbors — could live up to the example he left us.

But what if there was a method to Rogers’ kindness? What if we saw it not as some unattainable state, but a practice — one to which he committed himself every day of his life? And what if we cultivated a “kindness practice” of our own, with a clear plan and some helpful tools? In our own lives and our own ways, we might make kindness a habit.

A national campaign calls us to do just that.

Launched by Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, the Born This Way Foundation’s #BeKind21 initiative invites millions of people to practice kindness for the first 21 days of September. By creating custom kindness calendars full of deep-and-simple acts — acts that encourage us to stand up for one another, to prioritize our physical and mental health, and to respect and value our neighbors — we, too, can start to do what Rogers did: build a kinder, braver world that affirms and celebrates everyone.

It’s an idea that builds on Rogers’ blueprints. Like an elite athlete, Rogers had a regimen — a daily practice that helped him choose kindness even when kindness seemed futile. He rose each morning at 5 a.m. to give himself a few free hours, during which he’d pray for other people, think about who he’d encounter and envision how he’d be kind, says his biographer, Maxwell King. He’d follow that with a swim, and what is exercise but an act of kindness for the body?

His list of habits goes on. Breakfast was vegetarian. (Kind to animals and the environment alike, Rogers famously refused to eat anything that had a mother.) Upon arriving at the office, the first thing he did was answer letters from his television neighbors — sometimes 50 or 100 a day. As his late wife, Joanne, wrote in the foreword to “When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids,” “No one worked harder at being Fred Rogers than Fred Rogers himself.”

It’s no secret that here in Southwestern Pennsylvania, plenty of work remains. Fortunately, we have countless neighbors showing us the way, from teachers to crossing guards to children. That’s why, throughout #BeKind21, a coalition called Just The Way You Are will highlight local examples of kindness, profiling the people and places living up to Rogers’ legacy. A partnership among the Fred Rogers Center, JAMbethekindkid Inc. and the authors of “When You Wonder, You’re Learning, Just The Way You Are” will share insights from the Fred Rogers Archive in Latrobe, a Rogers-inspired kindness calendar, and even special #bethekindkid T-shirts that support Haitians affected by the recent earthquake.

In a world where kindness seems lacking, it’s all we can do to commit to kindness ourselves. It’s not always easy, of course. “Try your best to make goodness attractive,” Rogers once said. “That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.”

We revere him today because he accepted that assignment every day of his life. He didn’t always ace it; Rogers was human like everyone else. But by waking up and trying again — and then again and again after that — he became the person we needed him to be. He became the person whose songs we sing when the world turns topsy-turvy. He became a tether to what’s best in us, revealing the source from which all kindness springs: the acceptance of ourselves and our neighbors, just the way we are.

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