The cashier was talking to an older woman in front of me about her grandson’s exam results. Not rushing it. Not glancing at the queue. Just listening, the way you listen when you’ve known someone for twenty years and their grandson’s exam results actually matter to you.
Behind me, a woman in hiking sandals was shifting her weight from one foot to the other, sighing loud enough that it wasn’t really a sigh anymore. She turned to the man next to her and said, not quietly enough, why is this taking so long, we’re on holiday, not in a meeting.
I felt the old instinct rise up in me. The one that wants to turn around and say something sharp. Something like, you’re in the Ardennes, not a motorway service station, slow down. I could feel the words forming.
I didn’t say them.
Instead I turned around, found her eyes, and smiled. Kept my face calm. Didn’t perform it, didn’t make it big. Just let my face do the thing it does when I’m not bracing for a fight.
She looked confused for a second. Like she’d expected a different reaction — irritation back, or at least someone else who’d quietly had enough of waiting through another unhurried catch-up at the till.
Then something in her shoulders dropped, just slightly, and she gave me a small smile in return. She stopped shifting her weight. She actually waited.
Kindness as a Quiet Override
I think about that moment more than it probably deserves. Not because anything dramatic happened — nothing did. A stranger relaxed her shoulders in a supermarket queue. That’s all.
But it stayed with me because of how close I came to doing the opposite. I had a sharp comment ready. I had justification for it — she was being rude, she was being impatient with people who weren’t doing anything wrong. I would have been within my rights.
And yet the moment I imagined saying it, I could already see how it would go. She was wound tight. A comment like that wouldn’t have landed as a correction. It would have landed as an attack, and she would have defended herself, and the cashier and the woman ahead of me and everyone else in that queue would have been pulled into a small, unnecessary storm.
So I chose the quieter option. Not because I’m endlessly patient — I’m not, ask my partner Roger — but because I could see, in that moment, that calm was the only thing that had a chance of actually shifting anything.
That’s the part I think gets missed when people call kindness the easy option. In that moment in the queue, irritation was available to me. So was judgement — a quiet, satisfied little story about how holidaymakers don’t know how to slow down. So was indifference, just turning back around and letting her stew in her own impatience. Kindness wasn’t the only emotion on the table. It was the one I chose out of several that would have been easier, and that’s where the strength actually is — not in being naturally calm, but in picking calm over everything else that was sitting right there, ready to use.
This is the part people get wrong about kindness more generally. They think it’s the soft option, the easy one, the one you choose when you don’t have the energy to fight. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes it’s the harder choice, because it requires you to override an instinct that’s already firing.
Why Kindness Reads as Naive
We live in a culture that rewards the sharp comeback. The put-down that gets repeated later as a story. Confrontation reads as confidence. Softness reads as weakness, or worse, as something to perform — fake niceness, the kind that’s really just conflict avoidance in a nicer outfit.
I understand why. A lot of people have been kind in ways that cost them — kindness that got mistaken for availability, for a yes, for permission to keep asking. If you’ve spent years being the one who smooths things over, who absorbs other people’s bad moods so the room stays calm, kindness can start to feel less like a virtue and more like a job nobody hired you for.
I’ve written before about the invisible load women carry, and this is part of it. The emotional labour of staying calm so other people don’t have to. Of absorbing someone’s bad day so it doesn’t ripple out and become everyone’s bad day. Women in particular get cast as the default smoothers, the household barometer, the one who reads the room and adjusts first. That’s not the same as choosing kindness. That’s an unpaid role, and it’s exhausting, and it has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here.
What I’m talking about is choosing it. Deliberately. From a place that isn’t depleted, even if it’s tired. There’s a real difference between kindness that comes from abundance and kindness that comes from obligation, and most of us have done both, often in the same week, sometimes in the same hour.
Kindness Isn’t the Absence of a Boundary
I want to be clear about something, because I think this is where the idea gets muddled.
Choosing not to snap at a stranger in a supermarket queue isn’t the same as having no boundaries. I wasn’t agreeing with her impatience. I wasn’t apologising for the wait, or rushing the cashier, or making myself smaller so she’d feel more comfortable. I just didn’t add fuel.
There’s a version of kindness that’s actually self-erasure — saying yes when you mean no, smiling through something that’s genuinely hurt you, keeping the peace at the cost of your own clarity. I’ve written before about what it actually means to hold a boundary gently rather than abandon it for the sake of being liked, and this matters here too. The kindness I’m describing isn’t about abandoning my own irritation. It’s about not handing it to someone else to deal with.
If that woman had said something directly to me — if she’d been rude to my face instead of to the man beside her — I’d have responded differently. Calmly, but clearly. There’s a difference between meeting someone’s impatience with calm and meeting someone’s disrespect with silence. One is kindness. The other is just absorbing harm and calling it grace, and I’m not interested in doing that anymore, for anyone.
Kindness Pointed Inward
I’m good at offering this kind of grace to strangers. I’m worse at offering it to myself. The same calm I found for a stranger in a supermarket queue is nowhere to be found when I’m the one who’s late, or snappish, or hasn’t managed to do the one thing I promised myself I’d do that day. With myself, the irritation, the judgement, the indifference — all the things I managed to set aside in the queue — come right back out, and I aim them inward instead.
I’m trying to get better at the other version. At noticing when I’ve handled something reasonably well and actually letting myself feel that, instead of moving straight on to the next thing I haven’t done yet. At giving myself the benefit of the doubt the way I gave it to a stranger who was having a bad moment on her holiday. A small pat on the back instead of an inventory of everything still wrong. It feels almost indulgent to do this for myself, which probably says something about how rarely I do it.
What I’m Holding Onto
I keep coming back to her shoulders dropping. That tiny, almost nothing shift. She didn’t apologise to the queue. She didn’t suddenly become a patient person for the rest of her holiday. But for about ninety seconds, something in her loosened, and I think that happened because I didn’t give her anything to brace against.
That’s the strength I mean when I say kindness takes strength. Not the performative kind, not the kind that makes you the bigger person in a story you tell later. The kind that costs you something small and private — a sharp comment you don’t get to say, a moment of being right that you let go of — in exchange for something you’ll never get to measure. You don’t usually find out what happens after. I don’t know what the rest of that woman’s day looked like. I don’t know if she carried that small softening into the rest of her holiday or whether it evaporated by the time she got to her car.
I’ll probably never know. That’s the uncomfortable part of choosing kindness as a practice rather than a transaction — there’s no guarantee of a return, and most of the time you won’t see one even when there is one.
I’m choosing it anyway. Not because I always manage it, and not because it makes me better than the version of me who sometimes doesn’t. Just because, on the days I can manage it, it seems like the only response that doesn’t add more weight to a world that already feels heavy enough.