Edel Coffey: Kindness can be life-changing when you are in desperate need of it

Edel Coffey. Photo: Ray Ryan

I had to think actively about kindness this week as part of a course I’m doing. You’re supposed to try to visualise kindness, or failing that someone who recently showed you kindness instead. What exactly is kindness, I wondered?

I asked a few friends for their suggestions. “It’s when you’re nice to someone even though they don’t deserve it,” said one. “It’s when you show up for people,” said another. Neither of these really chimed with my idea of kindness, which is much less dutiful. For me, kindness has no association with obligation. My understanding of it is the giver and the receiver feel equally good.

Feeling a moment of kindness can be like the sun emerging from behind a cloud, warmth on your body momentarily melting away the complicated tangle of your problems. It can change your mood and perspective completely.

Unexpected kindness can be truly disarming. Have you ever been reduced to tears by the simple question: ‘How are you?’ Asked in the right tone of voice and by a person who really cares, it can be the kindest, most meaningful question. And even though, as Irish people, our default answer is supposed to be ‘grand, thanks’ sometimes the kindness of that question can dissolve our polite defences and force us into telling the truth, safe in the knowledge that we will be treated with kindness.

If you encounter someone sad, angry, grumpy, or aggressive, responding with kindness can defuse the whole situation, like cutting the trigger wire in an emotional bomb.

But we live in a busy world. Do we really have time to be kind to everyone all the time? The Dalai Lama thinks so. “Be kind whenever possible,” he says, adding, somewhat infuriatingly, “it is always possible.” But that’s the Dalai Lama. What about everyone else?

Kindness has become somewhat cloying since it has been co-opted by the positivity industry. It adorns children’s T-shirts and shutters through my Instagram feed. Every second or third post seems to say something like: ‘In a world where you can be anything, be kind.’

It’s all so bland as to be almost meaningless, and more dangerously, it feels twee and uncool to be kind. Likewise, the Random Act of Kindness movement is a lovely idea but somehow has become performative, always captured on a smartphone with a hashtag instead of just happening, privately, anonymously.

I’ve also started to think that kindness is a privilege. It’s easy to be kind when you have everything you need, easy to pay for someone’s coffee when you have money to spare, easy to be patient when you’re not under time pressure. Some people aren’t so lucky.

The Holocaust survivor, Werner Reich, who died last month at the age of 94, once gave a Ted Talk about kindness, telling the story of how, after he was arrested by the Gestapo at the age of 15 and ended up in Auschwitz, his bunkmate, a professional magician, performed a card trick for him, and then explained how he did it. Years later, after Reich had been liberated and started to rebuild his life, he eventually bought himself a deck of cards and finally got to perform the trick he had learnt in Auschwitz. It still worked. After he retired, he started visiting schools and showing children the magic tricks he had learned. His goal was simply to make the world seem like a better place.

In his Ted Talk on kindness he said: “If you know someone who needs help, someone who is scared, be kind to them, give them advice, a hug, teach them a card trick. Whatever you do will be hope for them and if you do it at the right time it will enter their heart and be with them wherever they go forever.”

Kindness, just like its corollary love, is all about timing. Just as with love, often we find kindness where we least expect to and often it shows up when we most need it. As I continued to think about kindness this week, the best definition I could arrive at was linked to Werner Reich’s story. For me, kindness is when you give another person hope, or you make them feel less alone, even if it’s just for a moment, even if it’s just smiling at a stranger as you pass them, letting them know that you see them, that they are not alone.

The thing is, we all remember the people who showed us real kindness when we most needed it. Kindness can be life-changing when you are in desperate need of it.

And you don’t have to be in desperate circumstances to be in desperate need of kindness. I was at the GP recently and a few weeks later she called me out of the blue to see how I was. Her phone call came at exactly the right time and it was an image of her kind eyes crinkling above her surgical mask that came to mind when I tried to visualise kindness in my course.

I suppose kindness, however big or small, is really just showing each other that we care.