In 2023, I thought a lot about kindness

Published on 21 December 2023

Last year, I was standing at a bus stop in the rain without an umbrella. I’d not predicted, when I left home in a rush, that it was going to rain. 

My bus was still five soggy minutes away. 

As the rain got harder, something extraordinary happened. A woman waiting beside me at the bus stop who had had the foresight to bring an umbrella took a few steps towards me. Before I knew what was happening I found myself sheltered under the eaves of this stranger’s umbrella. 

There was no conversation between us beyond my bewildered and grateful thanks. We simply spent the next five minutes listening to the soft pattering of rain on the nylon canopy, and then we got on the bus and I never saw her again. 

I tell this story over and over because I am astounded by it. I am astounded by the purity and unexpectedness of this single action. But what struck me most was how much difference this act of kindness made for me as its recipient, and how easy it was for the woman with the umbrella to make that difference. She didn’t have to sacrifice time, or money, or physical energy. 

She didn’t even have to speak. 

This interaction made me resolve to take similar acts of kindness: Things that are easy for me, and impactful for whoever – be it a stranger or friend – is on the receiving end.

That didn’t mean buying my friends extravagant gifts, donating half my savings to charity. It meant thinking about the people around me in a given context and the small things within my power that might make a difference for them: Offering to help lost-looking people on public transport, wishing happy birthday to that person who isn’t expecting me to remember their birthday. Sheltering pitiful-looking strangers under my umbrella. 

There are lots of people who would do these things instinctively, and I regret to say I am not one of them. But my hope was, with a bit of effort I could be, and that felt like an easy goal to set myself. 

What I’ve discovered, in fact, is that it’s hard. 

In my mix of failed and successful attempts to do kind things over the last year, I’ve thought a lot about what gets in the way of us doing the right thing. 

The first obstacle is being too caught up in our own needs (anything from desperate, existential needs to just wanting to get home to have dinner) to have the energy to act on the needs of other people. And the other – which becomes justified by the first – is forgetfulness, or neglect: The fact that an act of kindness doesn’t occur to us in time, or at all. 

These obstacles are normal, and human, and I begrudge nobody for experiencing them. 

But for someone like me, fortunate enough in my circumstances to not be constantly consumed by my own needs, I decided they were not an excuse to stop trying. In fact, the kernel of simplicity at the heart of this sticky, infinitely subjective discussion about doing the right thing is that it is really about trying.

I have developed a rule. When it comes to acts of kindness, I do not beat myself up for failing to do what didn’t occur to me, or what I forgot to do. I do not beat myself up for being too consumed by my own needs, for being too sad or too tired. 

Instead, if it occurs to me to do something small and kind, and if I have the means and the motivation at that moment in time, I will do it. The beauty of this policy is that it sparks a conversation with myself about motivation, about what I am capable of in that moment. Do I have the energy to offer to help? To ask if this stranger is lost? To send that spontaneous text that I know will make my friend laugh? 

Very often, the mental process of asking myself this question does something to spoon out a layer of motivation that I didn’t know I had. So the result of the conversation about what I am capable of tends to be: More than I initially thought. 

The rule has other benefits. It acknowledges the flux of life. It forces me to take note of when things are difficult, when my needs are particularly overwhelming, and exempt myself from the expectations – even the ones unrelated to my capacity for kindness – that I normally have for myself. 

I do not always do kind things instinctively, but the difference is now that I challenge myself to try. And that feels empowering, and brave. And a lot of the time, like that kind stranger shuffling a few steps closer to shelter me from the rain, it is remarkably easy.