On Kindness

First Published: 2025 September 15

Draft 1: 15 September 2025

Today in the Uber from my brother’s apartment to the train station, the driver asked why I was in town.¹ When I said that I was visiting my brother, he replied “Oh, that’s so kind of you.” That made me think about the word kind.

It was clear pretty quickly that English was not his only mother tongue.² It’s totally possible that kind is just the word he has for general sense of positive action. However, I then started thinking about one of the conversations I had with my mother and family. She expressed that she did not think of herself as nice, and the rest of my family disagreed. I generally agreed with her, since and kind are different³.

In reading Brene⁴ Brown’s “Atlas of the Heart”, I was glad to see that she had the same opinion. While I did not agree with all of her emotional definitions⁵, I did greatly agree with her distinction between kind and nice. Kindness is helping others, not just by doing what you think that they need, but doing what they actually need.⁶ Niceness, by contrast, is not rocking the boat.

My mother was a small first-generation college-educated woman. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that she learned not to be nice very early on in her career. If she was unwilling to rock the boat or be a nuisance, then there was no way that she would accomplish any of her professional goals. She was more than willing to tell people when they were wrong, and was more than happy to stand up and disagree with others.

However, she tempered this general lack of niceness with the greatest amount of kindness I think I have ever seen in someone. My entire life, old farmers would come up to us when we were in public to ask my mother for medical help. She always made time for them. One day I asked her why, and she explained that for many of them, not only is the act of going to the doctor something incredibly time consuming, but it is also an uncomfortable environment.⁷ By helping them with their questions when they came up, however, she was able to monitor them and make sure that they were doing ok.

Whenever someone collapsed in church,⁸ she was the first to respond. At one of my football games, a player hurt his neck, and she leapt over the fence and onto the field almost before anyone else noticed.

So, then, other than gushing about how great my mother was, what’s the point of these past paragraphs?

Honestly, not totally sure!

I’ve written a fair bit lately about the meaning of words, and so spending some time distinguishing kindness and niceness feels reasonable enough. I think that this can honestly be a reasonable enough short musing. Maybe it’s just that I want to make sure that this post gets posted, and I know that I won’t if I keep waiting. Still, I’m starting a sixty⁹ hour train ride, which means now might very well be a great time to start binding books again!

Daily Reflection: 15 September 2025

• Did you journal by hand today?

  Not so much, if only because spending time with my brother often precludes that.

• Did you do a folly?

  Couple more days of failing to write. Sad enough.

• Did you in some way, shape, or form advance the web novel?

  As always, no.

• Did you work on music, whether education or creation?

  As always, no. I did talk about music a bit yesterday, which was nice.

• Did you work on book binding?

  Still no.

• Did you work on another hobby?

  Spent time with my brother, went for some walks!

• Did you stretch? Really?

  Not really, a little in the shower.

• Prayer?

  Nope.

• Meditation?

  More or less no.

• Reading?

  Some, but not a lot.

• Minimizing screen time?

  Yes! Benefit of time with brother is that I spend less on the phone.

Current Pen List¹⁰

• Hongdian Black with Fude Nib: Diplomat Caribbean (8/30ish)

• Jinhao Shark: Diplomat Caribbean (8/30ish)

• Pilot Preppy: Private Reserve Electric DC Blue I think (I think since late june. I think)

• Sheaffer: Private Reserve Spearmint (since 7/15) (I Think)