In theory, we all love kindness. But of course, theory and reality rarely line up. Ask anyone who works in a customer service role. But before we rush down the path of critical examination of human interaction between customer service agents and the rest of the population, perhaps we should pause and think a little more deeply around the idea of kindness. So much of what we value is in fact preserved by kindness and is compatible with it. We can be kind and successful, kind and exciting, kind and wealthy and kind and potent. Kindness is a virtue awaiting our rediscovery and our renewed, un-conflicted appreciation.
What I have come to learn from the generous vocation of being of service is what we tend to be most short of from others is kindness of interpretation: that is, a generous perspective on the weaknesses, eccentricities, anxieties and follies that we present but are unable to win direct sympathy for. The kind person re-tells the story of our lives in a redemptive way. The kind person works with a picture of us that is sufficiently generous and complex as to make us more than just the ‘fool’ or ‘weirdo’, the ‘failure’ or ‘loser’ that we might otherwise so easily have been dismissed as. The kind person gives generously from a sense that they too will stand in need of kindness. Not right now, not over this, but in some other area. They know that self-righteousness is merely the result of a faulty memory, an inability to hold in mind – at moments when they are truly good and totally in the right – how often they have been deeply and definitively in the wrong.
Kindness remembers how there might still be virtue amidst a lot of evil. Kindness is aware that when someone is rude or insulting, they are not usually revealing the secret truth about their feelings; they are trying to wound the other because they feel they have been hurt – usually by someone else, whom they don’t have the authority to injure back. Kindness is interested in mitigating circumstances; in bits of the truth that can cast a less catastrophic light on folly.
Pausing momentarily as emotions want to boil up in response to something that just happened, perhaps we could look to see people’s weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points (even if none of these benefits are apparent right now). What we’re seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are genuinely good about them. We’re picking up on weaknesses that derive from strengths. Kind people have overcome the unhelpful idea that – if one looks harder – it would be possible to find someone who was always perfect to be around. If strengths are invariably connected to failings, there won’t be anyone who is remotely flawless. We may well find people with different strengths, but they will also have a new litany of weaknesses. It’s always necessary to take a moment to remind ourselves that perfect people don’t exist.
The modern world is currently very uncomfortable around the idea of a good person not succeeding. We’d rather say that they weren’t good at all than embrace a far more disturbing and less well-publicised thought: that – in fact – the world is very unfair. Kind people keep the notion of injustice always in mind. One of the most fundamental paths to remaining kind around people is the power to hold on, even in very challenging situations, to a distinction between what someone does – and what they meant to do. We’re seldom very good at perceiving what motives happen to be involved in the incidents that hurt us. We are easily and wildly mistaken. We see intention where there was none and escalate and confront when no strenuous or agitated responses are warranted.
When we carry an excess of self-disgust around with us, operating just below the radar of conscious awareness, we’ll constantly seek confirmation from the wider world that we really are the worthless people we take ourselves to be. It’s natural to see meanness everywhere when we see ourselves as fitting targets for insult. The kind person starts from the assumption that others are highly likely to be in quite different places internally. Their behaviour in social contexts is therefore tentative, wary and filled with enquiries. They don’t take what is going on for them as a guide to what is probably going on for you. Their manners are grounded in an acute sense of the gulf that can separate humans from one another.
The kind person works with an underlying sense that other people are internally very fragile. Their egos are assumed to be gossamer thin and at perpetual risk of deflating. Kind people therefore let out constant small signals of reassurance and affirmation. Kind people know that however confident we may look, we are painfully vulnerable to a sense of being disliked and taken for granted. All of us are walking around without a skin. Therefore, scattering flattering remarks isn’t devious or slick; it helps everyone to endure themselves. Kind people accept that they may never be able to transform another person’s prospects entirely, but their modesty around what is possible makes them acutely sensitive to the worth of the little things: they are always ready for a smile, they remember birthdays, they write postcards and devote time to friendly chats.
Kind people know how to be a little shy. Shyness has its insightful dimensions. It is infused with an awareness that we might be bothering someone with our presence, it is based upon an acute sense that a stranger could be dissatisfied or discomfited by us. The shy person is touchingly alive to the dangers of being a nuisance. The kind person is a warm gentle teaser, who sometimes latches onto and responds to our distinctive quirks and gets compassionately constructive about trying to change us for the better: not by delivering a stern lesson, but by helping us to notice our excesses and laugh at them. Perhaps the most instructive question we can ask – the one that teaches us most about the value of affectionate teasing – is simply: what would I want a kind person to tease me about?
Kind people know that however solid and dignified someone appears on the outside, behind the scenes there will inevitably be a struggling self, potentially awkward, easily bemused, beset by physical appetites, on the verge of loneliness – and frequently in need of nothing more subtle or elevated than a hug or a cheering chat. Kind people flirt. Good flirting is in essence an attempt, driven by sympathy and imaginative excitement, to inspire another person to believe more firmly in their own likeability, psychological as much as physical. It is a gift offered not in order to manipulate, but out of a pleasure at perceiving what is most attractive in others.
However much they love the truth, kind people have an even greater commitment to something else: being nice. They grasp (and make allowances for) the ease with which a truth can produce desperately unhelpful convictions in the minds of others and are therefore not proudly over-committed to complete honesty at every turn. Their loyalty is reserved for something they take to be far more important than literal narration: the well-being of their audiences. The kind person is a good listener, someone who doesn’t moralise. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. They know how insane we all are. That’s why we can feel comfortable being heard by them. They give the impression of accepting without bitterness or censure that human beings in general are endearingly crazy. Kind people reveal plenty about their own failings. They confess not so much to unburden themselves as to help others accept their own nature and see that sometimes being a bad parent, a shy introvert or a confused worker are not malignant acts of wickedness, but ordinary features of being alive that others have unfairly edited out of their public profiles.
Kind people know that the existence of highly troublesome elements in others doesn’t preclude the simultaneous presence of vast zones of goodness, humility and benevolence. They know that everyone’s right to charity, attention and friendship should not be irrevocably lost on the basis of some darker sides. While hoping it might be otherwise, kind people simply take it for granted that decent humans constantly do and think not very nice things.
Kind people know how to talk about their failures. They know that others so need to hear external evidence of problems with which we are all so lonely: how un-normal our sex lives are; how misguided our careers are proving; how unsatisfactory our family can be; how worried we are pretty much all the time. It’s deeply poignant that we should expend so much effort on trying to look strong before the world – when, all the while, it’s really only ever the revelation of the somewhat embarrassing, sad, melancholy and anxious bits of us that is what makes us endearing to others, and transforms strangers into friends.
To love someone involves not just admiration in the face of perfection, but a capacity to be uncommonly generous towards a fellow human especially at moments when they may be less than straightforwardly appealing. Love is an ability to see beyond a person’s often off-putting outer dimensions, an energy to enter imaginatively into their experiences and bestow an ongoing degree of forgiveness in the face of trickiness and confusion. Kind people know that we all have different tastes when it comes to being comforted. Some of us want to chat, others to be hugged, others to have fun. Kindness doesn’t remain at the level of intentions alone: it involves constant strenuous efforts to translate generous wishes into interventions truly aligned with the psychology and history of another human being. Kind people know the role of humour in easing relationships. Our lives are strung out between the merely imperfect and the truly awful. At best, we can move from seeing other people as idiots to viewing them as that far more tolerable and truly kind alternative: lovable idiots.
