Are you nice or are you kind?
What is kindness? It’s a big concept, one that I have thought about for years. It popped up again in the last couple of weeks while I was wrestling with COVID.
Ironically, I came down with the virus the week I was planning to get my third booster. At first I didn’t think it was COVID because my home test showed negative on the first day. Then I learned that this variant of the virus doesn’t show positive until three to five days after infection. By Saturday, it was positive within the first minute; it was also a holiday weekend. (You understand of course that you only really get sick on weekends, right?)
But I digress.
The reason I mention the virus at all is that a neighbor’s husband had phoned me about something or other, and learned I wasn’t feeling well. This gentleman is always doing what I consider kind things for people in the neighborhood, as does his wife. A day or so later he phoned me and said he was bringing something to my door and would just hand it to masked me through a narrow opening. It was a bunch of daisies from their garden. It was a totally unexpected gesture of what I consider kindness. He and his wife also checked on whether I needed anything from the store. Another friend of mine, unannounced, dropped off warm malasadas from her church that she knows I love.
These might seem like insignificant things to some people, but in a day and age where you often don’t even know your neighbor, or rarely might see them, I saw it as important. And it started me thinking again about kindness, and its components. I started thinking about all the ways a gesture, word, or in some cases no words, could pass for kindness. It’s possible we might not even recognize when someone is being kind to us, strange as that may seem. An example of that would be when you answer the door looking like a mess, and the person seems not to notice, or when you’re waiting to pull out of a store lot into traffic and someone actually stops to let you in.
But the questions I had about kindness over the years were obscure ones. For example, if you did the “right” things out of duty, but felt no emotion, were you being kind? Did “kind” count if you didn’t feel it? If the person you helped didn’t seem to care whether or not you were being kind, and just expected you to do whatever it was you did, were you still being kind? Mostly I think people know when they are being kind, but others just have kindness embedded in their genes and wouldn’t for a moment think they were being kind. They simply are that way.
A search of the internet showed that there were other scrupulous people like me who wondered about the difference between being “nice” and being “kind.” Turns out that distinction is a hot one in the academic world. According to Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, “The distinguishing factor seems to lie in the motivation of a person or act.” While “nice” can be used in many ways, even to describe objects, being “kind” denotes an underlying ethical benevolence, although the center says, “they don’t have to be mutually exclusive” or “mutually inclusive either.” Another website noted that being nice and being kind are not necessarily the same; one can be kind while not being nice. It saw “nice” as more superficial, and “kind” as “coming from a place of benevolence.”
There are a couple of quotes about kindness with which I will end this column, I really like them. One is Eric Hoffer’s “Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.” The other is from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation: “Kindness is doing what you can, where you are, with what you have.”
To paraphrase Saturday Night Live’s vintage “Coffee Talk” segment: Talk among yourselves. I’ve given you a topic.
Sandra Matuschka of Tiverton is a freelance writer and columnist. Send feedback and suggestions to smatuschka@cox.net or c/o The Newport Daily News, P.O. Box 420, Newport, RI 02840.
This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Are you nice or are you kind?
