In an Age of Unconscionable Cruelty, Practice Conscious Acts of Kindness
The best defense against a politics of barbarism is to treat friends and strangers alike with more care, curiosity and respect.
The news is so horrific these days that after a lifetime of tracking it with the avidity of a sports fan and committing my entire professional life to public media, I’ve started fasting from it altogether. Even the highest quality sources leave me in such a state of despair about human possibilities that sometimes I can scarcely look another person in the eye. It’s not that the reports aren’t true and that the developments they describe don’t deserve our urgent attention. But they suck the oxygen out of my lungs and leave me bereft of faith in any kind of positive human future.
Yet in day-to-day encounters with friends and strangers alike, I find that we treat each other far better in person than the media mirror would have us believe. At the same time, one of the pernicious effects of these almost exclusively negative portrayals of our fellow humans in both conventional and social media is to make us deeply wary of engaging with those we don’t already know and trust. This chilling effect leaves us isolated and alienated from one another, afraid to cross the abyss that lies between us.
It takes deliberate effort and a measure of courage to reach across this no-man’s land and penetrate the invisible shell each of us erects to protect him or herself from outside contact. Sometimes the barrier is quite visible. Ubiquitous earbuds, especially among the young, amount to a “Do not disturb” placard on a locked hotel door knob. Having spent much of my adult life on a remote mountain homestead on California’s Northcoast, I’m perhaps more aware of the barriers many people erect to gain space, yet more curious than most to discover who lies behind them. Paradoxically I find that when I do, be it in the elevator or grocery line, in most cases the reserve melts away. A deeply withdrawn downward gaze is instantly replaced by a facial expression of relief and welcome surprise. In those few cases where my intervention proves unwelcome, I try not to take it personally, realizing that it’s not — they don’t know me from Adam — and that they have every right to choose when and with whom to engage.
In my experience, kindness begins with that first gesture of reconnection, an almost subversive act in a culture of extreme isolation and atomization. I find that once the trance is broken, people don’t need to be coached in how to engage. By and large they’re eager for it. If I express my natural curiosity about who they are and what they’re up to, we quickly find a point of common interest. They seem relieved to discover that someone actually cares enough to ask. Shared laughter soon ensues, changing the complexion of the day by creating a moment of shared grace and unspoken gratitude. We walk alongside one another like the newfound friends we are till our differing destinations lead our ways to diverge. From then on we recognize one another the next time our paths cross, nod and occasionally update one another.
The Healing Power of Deep Listening
Sometimes the connection goes deeper. One evening I returned from seeing a movie and stepped into the elevator in the thirty-story Bay Area condo where I lived part-time for eight years. Before the doors closed, another man joined me there. He pressed 26 after I’d pressed 27. His head was cast down and his expression emanated an air of dejection.
“So how are things on the 27th floor?” I asked.
He looked up and glanced briefly in my direction. “Not so good, actually,” he replied. “My mother has ALS and she can hardly move or speak.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear it,” I said. “My father had ALS, so I know how it feels to watch it happen to a loved one.”
By the time we reached the 26th floor and the elevator door opened, there was just too much more to say and hear to end it there. I stepped out with him and we talked for half an hour. Eventually he and his brother came to dinner. Our friendship continued for several more years till their mother finally passed. The experience left an imprint of shared grief and solace between us.
In a different context, I’ve made friends with several homeless men who often stand and solicit contributions in front of the uniquely diverse local supermarket where I shop. They’re used to either being altogether ignored or receiving small offerings of cash or food as shoppers drop them off, usually without pausing to talk. When I have time, I stop and resume the thread of conversation we began years ago. I know their stories by now and follow up on what’s new as they tell me how they’re dealing with social service agencies, medical facilities, their children, and the ceaseless challenges of finding a place to sleep at night in one or another boarded-up building the cops haven’t yet discovered. I give them money, of course, but as Eugene tells me, what’s special about our interactions is that I want to hear his story as few others do. It helps that I’m retired and can take the time to listen. As with most homeless people, Eugene is used to being made invisible by the consciously averted glances of passersby. They erase him from their awareness as a self-protective measure to shield them from feelings of guilt or responsibility. My attentive interest is a form of contribution he seldom receives.
Then there are one’s responses to situations where there’s an opportunity to help someone in the moment, not when they explicitly ask for it but when one can see it’s needed. I see such acts of consideration all the time, when people go just a bit out of their way to help one another. Someone drops something and you reach down to pick it up for them. Someone gives up their seat for you in a crowded bus. Someone makes room for your car to enter onto the freeway when they could just as easily crowd you out, to which I always signal my gratitude by opening my window with an appreciative wave back to them. Are these deliberate acts of kindness or simply reflexive human responses?
Then there are acts of kindness and concern that go well beyond the commonplace — responses to overt acts of violence or abuse. We know from the so-called “bystander effect” that the more people are present when an attack occurs, the less likely it is that anyone will come to the aid of someone in distress. There are many reasons for this passivity and not all of them are bad. But it takes a considerable act of courage to put oneself at risk helping another. I’ve been there myself at different times in m life, first as a passive and paralyzed witness to abuse, then as a victim of assault, and finally as a rescuer of someone else being beaten. In the moment, one discovers what one’s made of. Whatever convictions we hold about our responsibilities as “our brother’s (or sister’s) keepers,” they’re put to the ultimate test by being confronted with a situation that calls out for an assertive response, yet raises dangers to oneself. Being trained in how to respond safely makes a crucial difference in one’s willingness and effectiveness in intervening in such an emergency.
Courtesy and Kindness
But I’m talking about a different kind of kindness. It’s perhaps less heroic but still admirable and more within the range of ordinary life. Here I find small acts of kindness and consideration, or perhaps mere courtesy, that are more common than we give each other credit for. There’s an interesting difference between courtesy and kindness. Courtesy is mostly a matter of manners but is no less vital for being so. And in this regard, there’s a widespread sense across all partisan divides that in an era when even those in positions of leadership are setting examples of egregiously ill-mannered and often deliberately cruel behavior, our manners are failing us and simple courtesy has vanished from many of our social interactions. The anonymity of social media has unleashed a venomous disregard for human decency and dignity that spills over into contemptuous speech and behavior in public life.
Courtesy is not a dispensable set of manners. It is no less essential to societal well-being than oil is to the proper functioning of engines. It’s a lubricant for social relations that has evolved over hundreds of years as the means we’ve developed to enable us to get along and accord one another the dignity and respect everyone deserves. Even if in a given moment we find ourselves unable to summon the energy to commit acts of deliberate kindness, “common” courtesy, like common decency, carries us through. In the spectrum of positive behavior, at one end lie politeness and “being nice,” a repertoire of social manners that keeps us between guardrails of appropriate behavior. Courtesy is a step up from there towards a more conscious set of self-imposed rules of behavior. At the other end of the spectrum lies kindness, a more highly evolved sentiment that connects to the core of our being and emanates from our open hearts. It’s not a matter of manners or even of conviction but the consequence of an open channel between our hearts and others’, even if it flows from only from our direction. That channel is open in each of us at birth and may remain so for the first few years before experience with one’s parents and peers trains one to be polite, courteous, kind, nasty or cruel. Most of us take our signals from those closest to us, but we also pick up habits from the broader society around us, including often toxic media and those individuals occupying seats of power, fame, wealth and influence.
Summoning the Courage to Be Kind
In an age of barbarism when cruelty and violence are not only commonplace but glorified in media and entertainment and inflamed by those who posture as strongmen, practicing kindness requires a rare measure of courage. Contrary to characterizations by those who engage in bullying behavior, kindness is not a “soft” emotion. On the contrary, it takes more courage to be kind than cruel. Cruelty is the coward’s way. Kindness, by contrast, is both tough-minded and tender, a blending that requires a higher level of consciousness to achieve. It emerges from a clear-sighted understanding of the human capacity for cruelty while refusing to be daunted by it or forced into submitting to its barbarity. In environments where demeaning behavior is the norm, from the belittling banter of an adolescent male locker room and “mean girls” who ostracize the group’s most sensitive members to Wall Street swagger and Silicon Valley’s Asperberger’s culture, those few with the courage to stay centered in kindness and integrity in such situations can sometimes exert an outsize positive influence on the group. It can take time for others to notice and be moved to change their own behavior. It’s not a weapon but an antidote that steps outside the tit-for-tat, us-and-them retaliatory dynamic and initiates a potentially transformative experience.
“My religion is very simple,” says the Dalai Lama. “My religion is kindness.” Faced with generations of implacable hostility and demonization by Chinese authorities who drove him and thousands of other Tibetans from their homeland in the 1950’s, he has refused to engage them on their terms and has instead disseminated the dharma of kindness and compassion to a wider world. Khenpo Paljor, a Tibetan teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, once told me about an uncle of his, an esteemed lama, who lived and taught in Eastern Tibet where Khenpo was raised. During a severe crackdown on Tibetan culture and religion, he was imprisoned by Chinese authorities. Harshly treated in jail, he refused to be deformed by their treatment into abandoning his lifelong practice of kindness and forgiveness. Instead, as he sat in his cell he practiced the Tibetan ritual of tonglen towards his jailers. Breathing in, he accepted the reality of the suffering that induced them to treat him and others in this way, including their entrapment in situations that precluded overt expressions of mercy or kindness. Then he breathed out to offer succor to them and all others caught in such predicaments. Over time, those individuals assigned to guard Khenpo’s uncle were so touched and moved by his unwavering kindness and inner composure in response to the brutalizing effects of incarceration that they came to treat him differently from most inmates, with more consideration and respect. In an altogether inhumane environment, they clandestinely practiced a greater measure of mercy and compassion.
Kindness as a Gift to Oneself
Like nonviolent action, which draws its strength from similarly transformative dynamics, the practice of kindness exerts its humanizing effect on both the practitioner and recipient. It is first of all a gift to oneself since regardless of the recipients’ responses, it lifts one out of the syndrome of isolation, bitterness and despair that an inhumane culture can produce. Kindness is an expression of a generosity of spirit, a source of true wealth that warms one’s heart even in the absence of a heartening response. But in many cases it proves to be an irresistible force in its own right precisely because it shifts the dynamic between tormentor and tormented in surprising ways. As we shed our stories of victimization that trap us in self-pity, we experience greater tranquility and transcendence.
The key to unlocking our compassion for those who appear to deserve none is to realize that their cruelty emerges not out of innate evil but from their own entrapment — mental, emotional, spiritual and/or physical — in circumstances, ways of thinking and feeling they find impossible to bear and therefore shift blame for their misery onto others. This understanding in no way absolves them of their brutal acts. But it enables us to respond to their inner torment in ways that help unlock their hearts to reconnect with both others and their own unacknowledged selves.
Under ordinary circumstances, practicing kindness in one’s daily affairs is both easier and more pleasurable than in the extreme situations described above. Yes, pleasurable! In large part because it feels good to be kind, to become curious about the lives of others, and to hear from them the stories they seldom if ever get a chance to tell others. What a relief to come out of self-absorption in your own drama and enter into another’s world long enough to gain much-needed perspective on your personal challenges. In the high rise where I lived part-time, Sylvia delivered the mail to all 525 boxes. I greeted her whenever I saw her and asked her how she was doing. Did she get good sleep last night? How’s the workload? I commiserated with her as she placed reams of useless third class ad flyers in each box that she and I both knew would be summarily filed in the recycling bin by virtually every resident. Over a period of several years we became familiar with one another, friends of a sort, and I looked forward to seeing her. In a small way, my interest might have helped her day go a bit better. I can never know for sure and that’s not why I do it. There’s so little I could do to help her through the challenges of her life. She wasn’t asking for help. But I could help her laugh about it, and that felt good to both of us.
No grand gestures or heroic acts are required to be kind in your everyday life. It’s mostly a matter of opening the channels between ourselves and others, be they friends, occasional acquaintances, or strangers, devoting attention they don’t expect but often appreciate. Not least of all, openly expressing appreciation for the casual small kindnesses we receive from others in the course of their work is a gift that just about everyone welcomes. It’s a well-earned recognition of the value of their contributions in jobs that these days can otherwise be mind-numbing and spirit-crushing. As I wait in the checkout line in my local market, I open a conversation with the person behind me. It passes the time and creates a brief connection between us. We share a laugh about the situation. When I reach the checkout clerk, I engage her too. In the eclectic market where I shop, she might be from Eritrea, Tibet or Peru. I ask her what part of that country she comes from and how she came to be here. We have just a brief window of time together during which one part of her brain has to be thinking about prices and code numbers while she answers, but she doesn’t seem to be bothered. By the time we finish, we’ve made a connection.
I find that the feeling of the market varies according to how I’m feeling when I enter. If I have good energy coming in, it will seem to me that everyone’s having a great day. If, on the other hand, I’ve waited too long to eat and am starting to crash, the place will feel like one big obstacle course where I can’t wait to get done and get out. One day I bring a dynamite chocolate hot sauce for my butcher buddy Herbert to taste. Everyone in the meat department wants to try it. Herbert’s slightly amazed I go to the trouble of sharing it with him, but it’s no trouble at all. I love seeing his eyes light up in surprise.
I warm up my day with such small, spontaneous gestures that emerge with increasing frequency as I ease into the daily practice of kindness. Since I no longer routinely ingest my daily dose of sulphuric acid in the form of the catastrophic daily news, the news coming my way through these random interactions is profoundly positive and life-affirming. I’m at home among friends in a familiar, almost familial environment. Am I burying my head in the sand by not tracking moment by moment the depravities and iniquities of human folly that I can only experience through long-distance, highly mediated dispatches from the front? Or am I doing more good for myself and everyone else by paying attention to what’s right in front of me in this moment and practicing acts of random and deliberate kindness as a means of making my world and others’ a little warmer?
Micro-Aggressions vs. Micro-Affections
Still, how can such micro-affections ever match the scale of the macro-aggressions now engulfing the globe? Well, maybe they can’t, but who knows? How does grass continue to grow between the cracks in concrete? Its life force drives a persistent, inextinguishable impulse to grow towards the light. And like the roots of trees and mushrooms, kindness mostly spreads beneath visibility by creating underground networks of mutual support that give it a resilience that brittle hierarchies of power will never match.
One of the most effective and even subversive acts one can commit in response to the stress, rage, isolation and alienation of our time is to turn to one’s friends and strangers alike with small gestures of kindness that affirm our common humanity and bring us the underappreciated pleasures of simple human connection. I practice such acts of tender regard and micro-affection not just on occasion but so often that it’s becoming a way of being that makes each such act easier and more spontaneous. Over time, I find, it transforms my days from routine and ordinary into something like a state of grace. It helps if I slow down just a bit so my mind and heart can notice and take advantage of opportunities for a welcome word or gesture of kindness without placing undue stress on what I need to get done in a day. Even just being recognized and greeted by name communicates to me at a subliminal level that “she remembers me. She cares. I’m not alone after all.” Her spontaneous gesture of caring lands in my heart like gentle rain on parched soil.
The cumulative effect of such successive connections is that your basic perception of life is gradually transformed from bleak to benign. You start to feel at home among family instead of estranged among strangers. Out of your practice of kindness grows a new habit of the heart as you learn to focus on others not as obstacles to your goal-driven forward movement but as always available opportunities for connection. Others begin to sense the difference in your demeanor and are instinctively attracted to you. Kindness creates its own magnetic field.
Kindness Is Contagious
But it’s crucial, I find, that we not view our acts of kindness as exchanges: I’ll be kind to you if you’ll be kind to me. That’s a transactional relationship and it emerges not from an open heart but a calculating brain intent on profiting from your interaction. True kindness has no strings attached, without any expectation or even desire for something in return. The gift is in your giving, which offers ample inner rewards in the form of an inner sense of fulfillment, a wholeness of heart. With each act of kindness, momentum builds. Kindness is contagious.
When I think of people in my life who radiate kindness, I think of my friend Romney. He’s a security officer who mans the front desk in the lobby of the high rise where I lived part-time. With more than 500 units in the building, there may be as many as 1500 people of all ages, races and backgrounds who routinely pass through the lobby. Romney greets pretty much all of them with a booming verbal embrace, calling each by name. When I come around the corner from the parking garage, I call out, “Rom-in-neeah!” And whatever else he’s doing at the time, he shouts back, “Hey Mark, how’s it going, man?” Late one evening during a quiet moment I asked him what impelled him to be so friendly to everyone.
“These are my peeps, man!” he exclaimed. “Gotta take care of my peeps!” A one-time cop, Romney has told me stories of dealing with chronically homeless folk as well as rougher types. He doesn’t present himself as a humanitarian, nor see himself as such. It’s just his nature, and a product of not always easy experience. One Thanksgiving, Romney had to work on the holiday itself and the swing shift the night before. At 11 p.m. he left the building, drove home and cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings — a roast turkey, a cured ham, yams, collard greens and dessert. It was just what his mom used to prepare for her tribe till she passed away a few years earlier. “I had to do it for my mom,” he told me. His whole extended family arrived at noon and tucked into the feast. As they sat down to dinner, Romney excused himself, wished everyone a great meal, and headed back for a full day and evening of work.
“You left the feast you had prepared yourself to go back to work?” I asked in disbelief.
“Sure!” he replied, laughing. “It gave me such satisfaction to do this for my mom that I had my own feast just preparing it.”
One day I described to Romney the dread and grief I feel about the direction we’re heading in as a country and a world. “God will do with us what He will,” he replied, “Our job is to wake up every morning feeling blessed for having the chance to do positive things for the world. Every time you greet someone with an open heart, you’re making a blessing — most of all to yourself. You actually feel better when you do it, even before seeing what it does to the other person. You do it because it makes you feel good.”
Clever But Not Kind
One of the most crucial ways we fail to live up to our promise as humans is in choosing to be more clever than kind. In an era oversaturated with “smart” everything and “i” this or that, we too often calculate our actions based on a narrow definition of personal advantage rather than common benefit. “I” alone rules and only those inventions that yield fleeting supremacy in an endless — and meaningless — competitive struggle prevail. Obsessed with what we might gain at the expense of others, we make clever but unwise choices that come back to haunt us later if not sooner. We alienate those who deal with us, breaking that bond of trust that is the foundation of healthy relationships. And while we may thereby gain temporary advantage, we ultimately lose their respect, and ours for ourselves.
Smart turns out to be foolish. Much of the innovation currently emerging from Silicon Valley and its progeny around the world is generated by an Asperger’s culture of amorality, generating one after another AI-driven invention destructive of the delicate social fabric that holds us together and gives us a sense of usefulness and belonging. We imagine that AI will eliminate all the mistakes to which we humans are prone when in fact it is committing the greatest mistake of all — eliminating those uniquely human traits of kindness and consideration for others. AI will never be capable of replicating this rarest and most vital of human gifts. Its vaunted machine learning will never learn the subtleties of human feeling directed by the mind’s conscience. But in its calculating brain it could well set us against one another in a pitiless struggle to be ever more clever in a world that no longer needs or values us, ignoring our capacities for empathy and compassion, kindness and joy. These will never be programmable through AI.
Forgiving Ourselves Enables Us to Be Kind To Others
In my experience, however, being kind to others isn’t really possible till you first know how to be kind to yourself. Nowadays, in certain circles, that’s coming to be known as “self-compassion,” the ability to forgive oneself for one’s mistakes and transgressions. Since all of us live to one degree or another in a cloud of ignorance, not necessarily of facts but more fundamentally of who we are and what we’re here on this plane of existence to learn, mistakes are altogether unavoidable. How we take them defines how we live our lives and the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we deny that they’re mistakes and double down on our insistence that we’re always right, we only compound them, and in the suppression of our consciences we harden towards others. We punish them for our own transgressions, blaming them for what in truth was our own mistake. If, on the other hand, we face them squarely and accept our responsibility for our own errors of judgment or failures of action or inaction, we take a burden of shame and blame off our shoulders. Apologizing to others directly if and when we can helps, but if that proves too much or, as in someone’s passing away, no longer possible, apologizing within ourselves can ease us through remorse and regret to a measure of resolution and absolution.
I’ve had to apologize many times in the course of my life, both to others and myself, for mistakes large and small, and I find that it gets easier the more often I do it. In a paradoxical sense, I find that I respect myself more for being able to apologize to others and forgive myself, for being truthful and flexible enough to accept responsibility for my actions and not reflexively shift blame onto others. This seems to be true even if I alone am not entirely responsible for the mistake, which is often the case. Moving out of a marriage that long served my wife and me well but that came to the end of its natural life forced me to come to terms with the many moments when I could have been more giving and forgiving. I could see that she too had her moments, but my focus remained on what I could have done differently. That truth-telling was an inward process, not a negotiation. But it turned what could have been a bitter parting into a respectful transition and a long-term post-marital relationship characterized by fond memories and mutual appreciation for all we’d done together.
Self-compassion, unlike self-indulgence, is a rigorous process that begins with taking responsibility for one’s own actions and setting aside what others could or should have done differently. That takes a certain measure of courage. One has to confront cringe-inducing memories. I sometimes find myself crying out, “Ahhh!” when certain long-suppressed regrets bubble up. At such moments, I find myself calling out loud, “Mark, be kind to yourself!” Then comes laughter and a certain relief. “Hey, give yourself a break!”
Oddly, this audible cry sounds to my ears like a command from some kind of compassionate elder, waking me up to the possibility of mercy. It’s also a practice in humility. Unlike humiliation, the fear of which causes many to bury their regrets still more deeply, humility brings us back to ground, not in an escape from shame but in forgiveness of our fallibility. That acceptance then opens us up to understanding and accepting that everyone, ourselves included, is acting from a place of limited perception. Everyone to some degree struggles to do their best navigating our way through the fog and mists of our unavoidable ignorance. “Forgive us, for we know not what we do.” I learn to gently un-lash myself from the crucifix of my own harsh judgments and begin anew, hoping to do better. Carrying that self-knowledge and self-forgiveness into the wider world, I find I’m better able to extend that mercy to others.
To say that I “practice” kindness is not to say that I expect to reach some kind of perfection at some point in my life. Practicing kindness is like practicing meditation or any other wisdom path. It’s a non-achieving, non-goal-seeking pursuit — a bit of a paradox for many Western minds driven by a fixation on achieving something tangible from all our efforts. Those of us who arrived at a Zen monastery in California in the early seventies to practice with Suzuki-roshi, a now-celebrated unconventional Zen master, were champing at the bit to achieve enlightenment at the earliest possible date. He advised us that those of us who had such notions of accomplishment were “wasting your time on the cushion.”
Practice is a way of life that goes on endlessly, Suzuki-roshi told us, and ambition for something greater or other than the witnessing of what is turns out to be a fatal distraction. Similarly, the practice of kindness is something you do as an spontaneous expression of your nature, without seeking a reward for it. Paradoxically, the less you want or expect something from it the more you’ll receive, first in the doing of it, which itself warms your heart, and then, as the cherry on top, from the way you see it lift the spirit of the one who receives your gift.
Unlike happiness, that elusive and ephemeral state of mind the perpetual pursuit of which often makes us still more unhappy, kindness towards others and oneself is altogether within our ability to cultivate. The more we cultivate kindness, the more grateful we feel. It’s a virtuous circle, building on its own momentum and warming our path through the world. In a most unusual convocation speech to a graduating class at Syracuse University in 2013, writer George Saunders admitted, “What I regret most in my life is my failures of kindness…Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly?” he continued. “Those who were kindest to you.”
Don’t wait till you grow old to begin being kind, he advised. “Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you — and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing does.”
