Mehr is usually translated as kindness. That's the smallest thing it means.

For many of us, it's a value we live by without ever having been taught it.

It is love — not the romantic kind, but the steady kind you feel toward the people you're bound to. It is the sun. It is the name of the seventh month, when the harvest comes in. And in its oldest layer, Mithra, or Mihr, it meant covenant: the promise between people that makes a society possible at all.

So one word holds warmth, light, harvest and obligation. It says kindness isn't a mood. It's something you owe.

There is a second word that lives beside it — mehrabani — which is mehr in action. Not the feeling. The doing.

So this month, remember what our culture has been telling us for three thousand years: we live by mehr, and we do mehrabani.