In the midst of nuclear weapons threat, inflation records and Remkes’ rescue work, I just read it this week Faith, Hope and Carnage, in which singer Nick Cave is interviewed by his good friend Seán O’Hagan about love, faith, mourning, music and life in general. A word that often comes up in their conversations is kindness. Cave describes how “small acts of kindness” of people helped him when his 15-year-old son passed away.
Coincidentally, I’ve been thinking a lot about kindness lately. It is not a trait that usually enraptures people: we look at The smartest personnot to The nicest person. Kindness is the girl next door among the properties: fine, but nothing special. As an adolescent I was terrified that people would describe me as nice. I saw niceness not so much as a distinguishing characteristic, but more as the primer of every character: if there were too few layers over it, then one had to name that niceness.
Later I discovered two things. First, it’s not true that everyone is nice. Kindness is a crossroads at which various qualities converge: empathy, selflessness, attentiveness. They are unevenly distributed across the population, with the result that some people are very nice, others are not at all, and most are in between. I am naturally in the middle of the normal distribution. I wish everyone the best, until there is still one free table in the restaurant. Then the mask comes off and I storm my target.
Second, kindness is indeed an important quality. When someone is nice to me, it has a big impact on my mood. Mood is a fragile thing that is subject to all kinds of factors every day, from world politics and sleep deprivation to interacting with those around you. Nick Cave describes how a saleswoman in a diner, shortly after the death of his son, squeezed his hand as she gave change. “That meant more than anything people had said.” I myself was touched recently after a nighttime collision. I hadn’t seen the shark’s teeth and so anticipated a scolding from the other cyclist, but instead he asked, genuinely concerned it seemed, if I had hurt myself.
Why is it so nice when someone treats you nice? I think the reason is existential: it means that you are seen, that someone says: ‘you are worth it’. This is precisely what people are often insecure about: they feel overlooked or treated like dirt, not just by politics but by the whole world. (This has to do with secularization, thinks Nick Cave: it has deprived people of their natural place in the world. But this is now going too far.)
“I believe that our positive individual actions, our small acts of kindness, reverberate through the world in ways we will never fathom,” Cave says.
The word ‘reflect’ is well chosen. Indeed, I think that one kindness provokes another, so you not only boost the good mood and self-confidence of that one person involved, but indirectly that of many others. Being nice is therefore also a political act: in a winter of crisis, a good mood can offer protection against mistrust and cynicism.
This may sound too weighty for something as small as a smile or a squeeze of the hand. But I think it helps to think of yourself in this way: that your life and actions are ‘of enormous importance’, as Cave calls it.
It does mean that you have to make an effort. As mentioned, some people are more attracted to kindness than others. „I have colleagues who get coffee for the whole department when they go to the coffee machine, but I am not wired that way,” said a friend with whom I discussed this. But you can move that wiring a bit. Kindness can be made a habit, just like exercise or meditation. You can greet the road workers and the homeless. You can make eye contact and smile, and stop your phone call when you check out. You can leave home a little earlier so you don’t have to cut anyone off in traffic, or get mad if someone does that to you. You can get coffee for your entire department, even if it’s not in your nature.
For starters, you can ask yourself: how nice am I really?
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 8, 2022