The Kindness Equilibrium

and all the ways we are actually, quite wonderfully, naturally, kind

Aug 06, 2021

Here’s a preview of my August. I chose kindness for this months newsletter theme not only because I believe in its power, but because August has always been kind to me.

Enjoy.

There was an orange light from next door streaming into the room. The beam landed in his closet. Just before this, he held my palms into its stream so he could look over them, turning my hand in his own hand. It was March just after my birthday and though it was chilly outside it was so many degrees warmer than the winter I thought we’d bypassed spring into summer. It wasn’t at all warm enough for such predictions. It was actually chilly, a spring chilly, which is gentle. His apartment though was well heated just above a certain degree so at night it was a relief to enter, but in the morning we’d pull the blankets to our ears daring each other to leave bed. The kind of cold that makes lounging the most enjoyable and safe.

Once done inspecting he took his whole hand, clasped it around one finger, and pulled until the knuckle cracked. It was an act of delicacy. To pull too hard would injure my finger. He had to feel it out a bit increasing the tension until the pop. He’d also have to know when to give up. When the knuckle was never going give no matter how far he continued to go. He did my whole hand and then the other and I felt more relaxed as it went on. All while he sat staring at the ceiling in thought. I began to tell him how my year off, my year writing, was coming to a close. I’d have to go back to school. I was unnaturally pessimistic over the idea.

“It will be easy you’ll finish your degree and then you’ll be done. You’re smart.” He said.

“No. No, it won’t be easy because I’m so stupid. Like genuinely stupid. It will be awful.”

I lifted my head off the bed to reply with emphasis and to make sure he believed me. He paused, again in thought. His eyes looked at me dead on. Not the usual flicking between the right and left, but instead staring down the center of me in silence. Until he took his free hand and put it on my ear and pressed my head to lay on his chest. He said in an echo,

“Don’t. No. Don’t say that please.”

We fell asleep just like that.

I always believed kindness was ordinary. To visualize it with this banality was sometimes difficult to do. Our usual perception often relying on the greatest form of kindness being just that, great. Big impossible to ignore care was the far end rare moments of life which counted for something, even for everything. Seen on tv as larger than life checks, monetized, or all-around lifesaving acts were not the things I thought of when deciding how to illustrate the ways we are kind to one another. Instead, I saw the look on his face after I finished my reply.

In retelling the moment it’s difficult to decipher where exactly the point of kindness begins, the cracking of the knuckles, its delicacy, or the complement of being called smart to begin with. Perhaps there is no beginning to things like this, but instead a moment of impact or a center of gravity where the rest of the kindness relies on the single action. This I think I can define based on where the memory tends to cycle and circle. The core, the center, the place of return, always finding myself on his phrase don’t say that.

In some ways, it is the most unremarkable part of the story, but there is an immediacy to its delivery. It changed the way I spoke to others, changed the way I spoke to me. I know too if I saw him on the street and told him this story he wouldn’t likely remember. The phrase so easily can be lost to time itself. This is why more often than not I understand kindness as something ordinary. Forgettable to those who commit it, but monumental to those it is gifted. This is perhaps why we so often lose our sense of kindness or believe the mythology of its rarity. Yes, it’s true kindness can be big but it can be small too and just as important. I say often, it’s not hard to be kind. I also believe being kind is a learned skill. Those two things can simultaneously be true. It’s easy to give up a seat to an elderly or pregnant person, and it’s something we learn to do as we get older. Our kindness isn’t static, it’s adaptable and soft.

To truly observe the world, the daily things we do, would illuminate what’s often overlooked. Kindness is everywhere. Tip jars, how are yous, apologies, taking turns, letting the other go, the helping hands grabbing something you dropped. It’s all kindness, the things we do not have to do but do anyway. I believe in the kindness equilibrium, we hover here and are greater than we anticipate. Cruelty has never been something room temperature to me. We don’t settle there. I don’t write this as a way to necessarily reduce what happens in life. I even wrote it in a poem, life has not been particularly kind to me, but I believe that others have been. The universe is likely neutral in its acts upon me and I hold no grudges. This instead embraces what we know to be true, we are kind to one another every day. Embraces how most kindness doesn’t have to be notable, but can be noted just the same.

When the idea to write about kindness came to me it was all rather simple. Calm even. The truth is I could have picked many moments where I experience big kindness to make the point others do impossible things for us. To showcase what we may think of when we think about kindness. When my professor sat for two hours while I cried and talked to me so I would feel better. The woman on the train who invited me to her dinner party after I said I liked her hat. Or even last month’s story, the F train businessman. Those were all big things, big reminders that people will give you everything they can which sometimes is an awful lot. My friends too, my family, are unfathomably kind to me over and over again. To pick however any of those moments would leave a hole I less often see filled or articulated. To allude that kindness is a highly curated decision reduces its care and love so monumentally we might never recognize it. Never would we understand the kindness of being asked not to say something after we had said it. Or learn how kindness happens in ways we might not count until much later. Until we see in hindsight how irreversible it was. The mundanity of kindness seems nearly imperceptible because we see it so often, because it is so simple we’ve forgotten to count it. We confuse politeness and kindness all the time.

People take comfort in the idea of how meaningless they are. This doesn’t bother me but I can’t say I feel the same. Not once I saw how much all kindness matters, how everything added up. On lonely days and sad days, people doing something so simple as to hold the door for me are what remind me I exist. To me, it doesn’t really matter the bodies the beings are forgotten but the acts themselves remain. When I look back to write about moments of extreme sadness I can feel, perhaps not find or specify, but feel nonetheless the kindness strung throughout those days. There is no energy given in our memory that does not leave its own particular indent. These moments I’m grateful kindness is so ingrained in the parts of life we might from time to time consider benign. You see cruelty is something we survive, but kindness is what we survive on. How powerful is this realization? In all our lives going from one place to the next, our very normal existence can mean so much.

I sometimes imagine, if I get a choice after I die, I will be allowed to ask whoever I meet what I did. I want to know how many laughs I shared or gave to others, how much comfort I offered the world. Maybe so I can try to give more in my next life, but to also relish the importance, however small, of the fact I existed. Perhaps this is a narcissistic wish, but more than anything it reminds me the meaning of action—of reaction. I think sometimes too we can confuse our being meaningless with being forgotten. The archive of memory isn’t exactly based on importance or impact. Events, acts, people, can all be forgotten and still hold massive importance to those who experienced it. Whether in that moment or in the continuous aftermath of its arrival. To be remembered is not the most important thing to me, not more important than being kind. Not to say I’m always kind, but in some ways always reminding myself to be.

It’s a strange and interesting world we are in. It might be easy to think just the opposite of what I’ve said. But for a moment you might try to look around, take in this new extension of the boundaries we call kindness. I remember right after the cracking of the knuckles I was telling someone this story and they said it was nice, that he cracked my knuckles, because he was trying to help me relax. It hadn’t occurred to me this was the reason. It might not occur to you what’s going on either. Until at last one fine and early morning as you’re running late for work you see someone coming out of the building just behind you. You hold the door open for them, despite all else. With the weight of the door still in your hand, you might consider how kind it is what you’re doing. Hmm... I think I would have to agree. In fact, it might be the kindest thing you could ever do.

Call someone you love and tell them you love them
Tip a barista
Go to bed early. (Make sure you’re also kind to you)
Find a patch of grass and walk through it barefoot
Dive into a wave and float for a minute in its aftermath
Smile at a stranger
Take your grandma to lunch
DM your favorite author and tell them how much you liked their book
Share someone’s artwork, wherever you think it goes best
Eat your favorite meal
Hold the door open for your neighbor
Water your plants
Pick something up that’s been dropped
Offer your seat to someone who looks more tired than you
Ask someone for their name, say hello, say thank you

People extended me unreasonable kindness, inexplicable kindness, indefensible kindness. People were kind when they knew that nobody would ever notice, much less praise them for it. People were even kind when they knew I wouldn’t appreciate it. Rob Sheffield Love Is a Mixtape

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of Myself. Invisible to others, but held in a rug, were all the places I had stayed — for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? By Jeanette Winterson

I walked into my house and suddenly it wasn’t my home. Not in some essential way. I stepped in the door and it felt as though my organs didn’t fit in me right, something less comfortable. August 1st, 2021 7:50 PM

I love you at lunchtime July 29th, 2021 12:44 AM

The clouds look like they’re falling inward. Deflating from the sky and for a moment I think I could manage to handle the tons of rain. July 23rd, 2021 1:00 PM

Here are a few of my unfinished masterpieces. I wrote a lot so I included a little extra

August to October is a sacred space. I know in some ways August marks the end of things, but to me, it symbolizes a beginning. I stress July I pray for rain. I want to sleep in, I want to relax, but summer is for doing. Summer as long as we have known is a freedom but an illusion of freedom. We can do what we want so we should always be doing something. I graduate in a week, for real this time, no exceptions. So summer vacation in some ways doesn’t exist. I know this is the last of it so I should enjoy it, all this free space to be young and mark this passage of time, shouldn’t I? Instead most often I’m just trying to get to August. July is a long extended sorrow. I feel deeply detached from my life. August saves me, grounds me. I love it here where the heat breaks at night, where the water gets warm, when the jellyfish come, when each storm threatens to end summer as we know it. In August I’m 100 and I know my life had to happen the way it did. When August ends I lose this hindsight, rejoin the calamity of wondering why things happen, but ultimately feel in me somewhere that same knowing perspective I only ever have in full during August. In August I start to miss the ocean and I hope each swim isn’t my last, each suspended float beneath the waves, the climb out of the water, until I promise I’ll come back for one last swim but never find the time to. When I think of love I think of the water, I meet all my soulmates while I’m swimming, those are my daydreams and August is for dreaming and for swimming. I’m writing this from my parent’s house as I finish this newsletter up. The two windows in my room make a cross breeze and late at night if I wake up to the quiet of Connecticut and August’s perpetual sleep I can hear sometimes faintly sometimes clearly the waves crashing onto the shore down the road. When the wind blows through these two windows I’m not sure if the noise is my sigh of relief or the world’s.

My kindest mood board yet awaits you in seas of purple and orange

Who would I be if I didn’t include this song at the end? A missed opportunist. This newsletter I hope you felt reading it as relaxed and calm as I did making it. I hope, maybe even implore you, to put this song on and sing very loudly. Go on, the lyrics are right there. You’ve got some time to kill before we speak next, might as well use it.

Chloé in Newsletter

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