When you’re a kid, you play on both ends of the spectrum—a indefatigably raw sort of kindness and a deviantly pure evil. But why do you do either? You’ve been instructed to do one, and the other just sounds like a real barrel of laughs. Besides, if you do end up frequenting the ladder over the former, you can just chalk it up to childhood idiocy. Then you grow up—motives change, the line blurs. Still, that same pull between decency and putridity shadows everyone. Which makes me think: is kindness a natural act? A deeply rooted survival instinct, hammered in to sustain the species? Or does goodwill warrant more autonomy? Is kindness a choice?
I’ve never found kindness to be all that easy. Over the years, I’ve met a few people who do; the older I get the more I admire that quality. But not for me. To me, being kind has always felt like an uphill battle. Why? Affection is nerve wracking; sympathy, exhausting; benignity, troublesome. In the end, compassion is undeniably rewarding, yet also immensely daunting. Truthfully, I think it takes just as much vulnerability to show kindness as it does to accept it; just as much as admitting that you need the help. Vulnerability is petrifying. Having that honest openness is a hard earned skill in my book. Eyeing down the possibility of rejection, criticism, and outright failure, and still taking the gamble, still showing kindness; that seems more like a conscious decision than a gut reaction.
What even is kindness? Sure, gestures like holding the door open, saying please and thank you, telling someone happy birthday can just be an innate reaction; someone’s pavloved you into knowing those are kind things to do. In my experience, real feats of kindness are conscious, dedicated decisions. Trying to be there for others when they’re struggling has to be purposeful, because there’s so many people who don’t do it. Or maybe, cruelty is just as natural a force as kindness; maybe they’re both more guided by natural function than personal thought. I mean think about it, why do you treat someone you’re upset with badly? Why do we bare our teeth; show our anger? On a base level, what is the gain from showing someone malice? Arguably, kindness posits some primal benefit (survival of the species, yatta yatta), I think the same is true of malevolence—self preservation. To strike back at what wronged you before being harmed further. Overall, regardless of whether or not either are calculated, both are motivated, at some level, by self-preservation.
But does the motive subvert the act itself? If you’re being nice for something to gain, is the act no longer kind? How far does that line reach exactly? If you show kindness because you want to help someone, or make them feel better, is that self-centered enough to invalidate the action? It raises the question: are you doing this for their benefit, or your own? To receive a reward of some caliber? Say what you want about callousness, but in the long run there’s almost never a benefit to acting awful; you could even argue “being mean” is more a visceral reaction to anger than a choice. As for kindness, you literally only stand to gain from being kind; feeling better about yourself, looking better to other people, getting yourself closer to someone. If what comes around goes around, showing compassion isn’t about helping someone, it’s about receiving something later. Call it goodwill credit. Yet, if the act itself is still compassionate, does the motive ruin it? Even if it impacted the other person positively?
What’s more, if the benefits of kindness are so grand and wide ranging, is it even a choice anymore? Can care and sensitivity devolve into subconscious decisions, and does that negate the purity of the deed? If there’s one thing I learned in Bryce Hadley’s Honors English II, it’s that actions are more powerful when presented as a choice. There’s greater stakes there. So, if kindness stops being or isn’t a choice, does that nullify its value?
I have no idea. This has been more a line of questioning than a decisive argument. Ultimately, I think the question is more personal than that. Kindness is a choice to me. The nature of compassion is a never ending discussion, and frankly I think we need to be more honest about it. I don’t know, how about I read your OP/ED next time.