Thinking about the nature of kindness

Is being kind a sort of weakness? Can you be both smart and kind? And where did all my weird ideas about kindness come from?

When I was a kid, what I wanted most was to be famous.¹ When I got older, I wanted to be liked—to crack the code that was popularity and be one of those kids. In my twenties and thirties, I wanted to be loved, to find that person, even if I was wrong about the kind of person I should be looking for.

By my forties, what I wanted most was to be kind, like my grandmother, who in the small town where I grew up was almost universally seen as the kindest woman around.² My grandmother died when I was in college and for years before that, she was in a nursing home, absent mentally, but still very much herself, beloved by all the nurses.

Which is to say that by the time I was old enough to be curious about who my grandmother was as an actual person, other than just Grandma, she was gone. Impressions and facts are all I have left. She was a schoolteacher in a tiny schoolhouse long before I was born. She raised six children. She baked the best bread, which she’d toast in the oven and spread with butter. She saved bread wrappers and braided them into jump ropes. She had a feather bed which we got to sleep in sometimes and rosewater perfume and all the grandchildren fought over who got to host Grandma on Christmas Eve so she’d be there when you opened your presents in the morning.

Piling on Grandma on Christmas morning. I’m in pink and my sister and I are probably in the middle of a fight over who gets to hold my little brother, which was worthwhile only if someone was taking a picture.

None of those things told me how my grandmother managed to be so kind. She’d been through some stuff in her life that could definitely make you bitter and angry. She was a serious church-going woman and her husband was…not. He died when my father was fifteen, under fairly scandalous circumstances (that’s a whole other story), leaving her alone. At least in my experience, there’s nothing about being old itself that makes you compassionate. In fact, most of the other old people I knew as a child were salty or outright mean.

So what was the secret of my grandmother’s kindness? That’s the question I started to ask myself in my forties. Was it Jesus? Maybe, but that answer wasn’t going to work for me. After a Sunday School teacher told me that my grandfather (the other one, my mother’s father) was going to hell because he wasn’t baptized, Christianity became…complicated for me.

Or even worse, was her kindness the result of a gendered passivity? If you were a woman in the times my grandmother lived in, going through the things she went through, was kindness just a survival tactic? Was it how you got by? Maybe, but then why was my great-grandmother on my mother’s side so, so mean? Super-villain level mean. Like, she got run over by a wagon on our family farm and it didn’t even slow her down because of the amazing healing power of meanness.

Was my grandmother just born kind and there was no point in aspiring to something out of my reach? I have some of her DNA, but also some of my great-grandmother’s genetics, though I haven’t been run over by a wagon yet to put the power of my own meanness to the test.

If it’s not all inheritance and it’s possible to become more kind, how do you go about it? That was the question and I was afraid the answer was—you don’t. Or maybe some people could, but not me specifically. There was no way I could become kinder because I’d spent the first forty years of my life cultivating a crusty, prickly exterior that was many things, but not kind. I was more than a little proud of how “difficult” I could be. How do you pivot from that? Did I even want to?

Deep down, I was afraid that it was impossible to be both smart and kind, and if I had to choose between the two, I knew which one would win. Reader, it was not kindness.

Where did this idea come from, that kindness and intelligence are incompatible? Even as I write the words now, it seems like such a stupid thing to believe. Gender is part of that connection I made between kindness and stupidity. Women are supposed to be accommodating and passive and nice and polite and, you know, stupid. They’re not supposed to get surly when that annoying uncle tickles them when they do not want to be tickled. They’re not supposed to insist on what they believe or argue for how they’re right. They’re supposed to smile and smile and smile.³ All these things are different from kindness, but for most of my life, that was a distinction I wasn’t yet able to make. I believed that to be kind was to be weak.

I also think capitalism has some responsibility for my misguided ideas about kindness. Capitalism is to blame for so many things. In a capitalist society, we value ruthlessness and ambition and the people who will crush every living thing in their path in order to reach the top. We elect those people president. Kindness has no real value in a capitalist system, except as a tiny trickle of just enough charity to keep the masses from finally revolting. Kindness is for losers.

Of course, capitalism is wrong and gender is wrong and I was wrong. You can be both kind and strong. Both kind and intelligent. All the very kindest people are. Gandhi. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Pope. Oprah. In fact, kindness and strength and intelligence are deeply connected. Smart people figure out that the most important and meaningful thing you can be is kind and then have the strength to put that into action. More than that, it takes a lot of intelligence to work out how to be kind. I know because I’m still trying to figure it out.

I’m 47 now and I no longer want to be famous or liked. I am well-loved—by my husband and my family and good friends, so, check that one off the list. I still want to be kind, like my grandmother, and I’m studying up on it, trying to learn from the best. I don’t know the source of my grandmother’s kindness, but I’m putting my own practice together, step by slow step.

Hope everyone out there had an amazing holiday weekend! Thanks to all the new subscribers and thanks to everyone for reading! If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and like and share and comment telling me what you think!

1. Really, what I wanted was to be able to sit on the couch on the Tonight Show between Jimmy Stewart and Johnny Carson, listening to Jimmy’s poems about his dog. Sadly, too late for that.

2. I’ve written a little bit about kindness before, here, but just to clarify—wanting to be kinder is an almost completely selfish aspiration for me. I want to be more kind because I also want to be less angry and bitter and sad and anxious and kindness is part of the antidote to all of those things. Kindness is an orientation to the world that helps me be more content. Kindness might also make the world a slightly better place, but I’m not counting on it. Kindness is not radical action in pursuit of social change. Kindness doesn’t end racial injustice or transphobia or change gun laws. As I’ve said before, if we really want the world to be better, we have to do a lot more than just be kind.

3. My grandma did not smile and smile and smile. When I think of her, I often see her sitting in the rocking chair in her living room. Her window looked out on Burlington’s main street. She’s rocking and staring out the window, but she’s not smiling. Maybe it was because people just didn’t smile as much back then or maybe she wasn’t a smiler, but her kindness did not take the form of endless smiling. In fact, she always seemed a little bit sad to me.