Yesterday morning, in a correspondence with
A Chailin Ruadh, she mentioned that that her manager had given her a bouquet of flowers for coming in to work on Saturday. "How kind" I commented. "Yes, it is unexpected" she replied.
Which got me to thinking: Kindness has become a very scarce and unusual thing.
What is kindness? That is a hard thing to connotatively define. Merriam Webster would tell you it is the quality or state of being kind, which itself is define as "having or showing a gentle nature and a desire to help others; wanting and liking to do good things and bring happiness to others." But that is only a general definition. Kindness, it seems to me, something more seen out of the corner of our eyes rather than clearly. It manifests itself in different ways:
- Choosing to creatively discuss a failure and come up with solutions rather than come down hard on the failure.
- Choosing to not draw attention to an issue at in inopportune time when it would detract from the main attraction.
- Helping when it is neither your responsibility nor your job.
- Speaking a kind word when it is not required.
Kindness is not costless, of course. It costs something to creatively resolve an issue instead of attacking someone or not speaking when to speak would be justifiable or to expend one's time on something that is not in one's area of responsibility. It costs us our right to ourselves, to perhaps be righteously indignant or angry or to answer questions after the fact about why we chose not comment when things were "blatantly obvious".
Why has it become so rare? The definition of kind perhaps gives us an answer: something about one's self and something about one's focus.
For the self, "having a gentle nature, wanting and liking to do good". This suggests that we have a nature such as this - and a gentle nature is something I would argue is neither valued by this society, this social system, or the values currently transcendent. Perhaps "wanting and liking to do good" is more universal, but too often it is only defined as good that benefits me somehow, not necessarily someone else.
For one's focus, both definitions focus on others, on helping them and wanting to bring happiness to them. This, again, would seem to be the sort of the thing that in principle is a thing valuable today, but in practice not so much.
Why? I wonder if it is not due to the fact that we as a civilization and a society have become concerned (extraordinarily so) with the self, specifically the things that benefit me. I am not discussing the legitimate concern and responsibility I have to provide for those I am responsible for. What I am talking about is the very real fact that for many, the universe really does revolve around them. And in the universe of One (Me), neither gentleness nor others figure as valuable commodities. They are more additions that can be thrown away as needed in the pursuit of the universal good (which in my universe, is the self).
It may seem that kindness is a bit of a luxury, the sort of thing that people can offer when they have taken care of all that is critical to survival, and perhaps one could argue that this is true. My counterargument would be that in fact kindness is as critical as any food, shelter, or clothing we need for survival. Without it, personal relations and society itself become a clashing battlefield of self against self, of my wants against your wants, of seeking the aggrandizement of self over all others.
If you would comment that this sounds a great deal like a vast civil and societal war, I would agree with you that it does. The question is more "How does one stop it?"
Like more wars, of course. Except in this battle, kindness becomes both the weapon and the goal to be sought.
