on kindness

I am about four miles into a five-mile run. The path is narrow, with a hedge to one side and wet grass and melting snow to the other. A woman stands ahead of me in the path while her dog sniffs around in the hedge. She starts to move to one side to let me pass when her (large, unleashed) dog suddenly hears me and starts charging toward me, barking. While I know that most likely the dog is friendly, I take no chances. Heart pounding, I make a very fast and very wide arc out into the muddy grass while the woman tries to grab her dog’s collar. 

Though individual dogs along the way have won my affection, I am not what one would call a dog person. And during my middle school days delivering newspapers, I had more than one unpleasant run-in with a dog. So I am not happy.

As the woman successfully catches her dog, various comments run through my mind. I am on the verge of yelling, “That is NOT okay!!” when I catch a glimpse of the woman’s embarrassed face, hear that embarrassment mirrored in her voice as she chides the dog.  

“Always be kinder than necessary, darn it,” I mutter to myself and continue on my way, swallowing everything else I want to say.  

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For this past Christmas my mother gave my family a fun chalkboard with a bright red border. We found just the spot for it in our kitchen. I had been collecting quotes on a Pinterest board for months and scrolled through to choose what should be the first thing I wrote up there. It was an easy decision. “Always be a little kinder than necessary.”

When I first saw this quote I did a little research and learned that it is a paraphrase of a line from J. M. Barrie’s book, The Little White Bird. The original line reads, “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than necessary?” I loved it.

Honestly, “kind” is not a word I would use to describe the me of the past four years. I recently wrote that one of the biggest surprises after my father’s death was how everything changed but nothing changed. Another big surprise for me was to find out that everything I had always heard and believed about how life-changing situations help us gain perspective was, for me at least, hogwash. 

I had lived my entire life believing that significant or serious or big things help us realize what is really important. Let go of pettiness. Choose the significant things. Stop making mountains out of mole hills. In short, help our perspective. And yet in the months after Dad died, the grief I felt over that loss, and the panic I felt when my newborn baby wouldn’t stop screaming in her car seat as we sat at a stoplight, and the frustration I felt when they didn’t have my kind of peanut butter at the supermarket — they all felt the same. Rather than gaining perspective from my experience, I seemed to have lost all perspective. And it certainly didn't leave me feeling kind. A sweet friend eventually helped me find a word that did describe me: raw. I was raw.

In this raw state, this suggestion to “always be a little kinder than necessary” spoke to me. Sounded like a salve to my rawness. Kindness. Calm, peaceful, gentle kindness. Yes. So up on the new chalkboard it went. 

 

The chalkboard, and the quote that just won't leave me alone.

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With that quote staring my family in the face for the next little while, it begins to seep into my consciousness. I bite my tongue, change my response, reevaluate my position on various things as this statement plays on repeat in my brain. Over the next several days I am, frankly, embarrassed to realize how petty and mean and unkind I can be about other people in my internal dialogue.

Into the midst of this come the woman and her dog.
 

A couple days later, my five-year-old daughter and I are driving home from gymnastics lessons. She is feeling very tender on this day and thinks that several little girls did not treat her very kindly during various moments of the lesson. She is in tears as we drive home.

We talk through the distress, the unkindnesses. After a few minutes I ask her, “Do you think you always treat those girls kindly?”

She lets out a big sigh.

“Mama, it is so hard to always be kind to everyone,” she confesses. “Besides, not being kind is really my one sin. And if I have no sins at all that will be like I am trying to be God.”

I spend the rest of the drive home holding back laughter as I assure her that she is not in fact in danger of becoming God. But as I think back over the episode I am more and more undone by her honesty.

Because it is so hard to be kind to everyone. Some people, sure. Sometimes, no problem. But always be a little kinder than necessary? Kindness might be, as I romanticized it, calm and peaceful and gentle when one is on the receiving end, but on the being end it is hard.

And yet oddly alluring.