I want to talk about kindness again.
I’ve written before about kindness as a personal quality — about staying soft in a world that rewards hardness, about choosing warmth even when it isn’t returned. But this post is about something different. A harder kind of kindness. The kind that costs you something. The kind that asks you to slow down, question your assumptions, and extend yourself toward someone whose life looks nothing like yours.
That kind of kindness doesn’t come automatically. It has to be chosen, deliberately, again and again.
The Friend I Thought I Knew
I have a friend — had a friend, in the way that people drift when their values diverge — who has become, with age, increasingly intolerant.
Near her village, there is a refugee camp. She had a great deal to say about the people there. About what they were like, what they wanted, what they represented. The words were not kind.
At some point I asked her: have you spoken to any of them?
She hadn’t. Not once. Everything she believed about these people had been built entirely from things she’d heard from others, or seen filtered through a screen. Not one conversation. Not one human exchange. Just the accumulated weight of assumption.
I found that striking. And sad. Because the people she was describing so confidently were, to her, not really people at all. They were a category. A problem. A source of anxiety. Not individuals with names and histories and reasons for being where they were.
The Road to Town
The camp is about a half hour’s walk from the nearest town. I pass it regularly.
When I don’t have the dogs in the car and I see someone from the camp walking that road — which is long and not particularly pleasant to walk — I stop and offer a lift.
We usually talk in a mix of English and French, which is sometimes halting and sometimes surprisingly fluid. I ask a little about where they’re from, how they’re getting on. I take them where they need to go, even when it’s not on my route.
These are not dramatic gestures. They’re small. But in them I’ve learned things I couldn’t have learned any other way — about where people have come from, what they’ve left behind, what it feels like to be waiting in a place that isn’t yours, dependent on the decisions of others, uncertain of what comes next.
I want to be honest here, because honesty is part of what kindness actually requires.
There is one man I’ve seen walking that road who makes me uneasy. Something about him — I couldn’t tell you exactly what — puts me on alert. And so I don’t stop for him. As a woman alone in a car, I pay attention to that feeling.
I’m aware that this is, at least partly, bias. I don’t know him. I have no real reason to distrust him. But I also think that kindness doesn’t mean abandoning your instincts entirely — there’s a difference between a gut feeling that’s worth listening to and an assumption built on nothing. I try to know which is which, even when that’s not always easy.
The Noise That Makes It Harder
The world is loud right now. Opinions arrive fast and fully formed. Social media rewards the quick take, the certain voice, the strong reaction. There is little space in that environment for the slower, quieter response — for pausing, for wondering, for giving someone the benefit of the doubt before the algorithm moves on.
Kindness gets crowded out in that noise. Not because people stop caring, but because the conditions aren’t designed for it. Speed and certainty are rewarded. Slowness and openness are not.
Which is exactly why choosing kindness — deliberately, as a practice — matters more now than it might have in a quieter time.
The Kindness You Do Without Thinking
The best acts of kindness I’ve witnessed — and the ones that have meant the most to me — weren’t planned. They were instinctive. Someone moved aside without being asked. Someone noticed without being told. Someone offered without waiting to be sure it would be welcome.
That kind of kindness comes from somewhere deeper than decision-making. It comes from having practised it enough that it becomes the default — the first response rather than the considered one.
I’m not sure you can think your way there. You can only keep choosing it, in the small moments, until it stops feeling like a choice at all.
The Kindness That Still Exists
I want to mention someone, because this post could easily read as bleak and I don’t mean it that way.
I follow someone on Instagram — Samuel Weidenhofer, @itssozer — who has quietly restored something in me about what people are capable of.
He goes up to strangers. People working in grocery stores well into their eighties. People who have lost everything to a natural disaster or a house fire. People who look like they have nothing. He asks them for something small — a few dollars, a bit of food. And without fail, even when they have almost nothing themselves, they give it. Without questions. Without hesitation.
And then he asks them about their lives. And the stories that come out — veterans with PTSD, people living in their cars, people in debt from medical bills they couldn’t afford, people still working full time at eighty because they have no other choice — are heartbreaking and human and completely invisible to most of the world passing them by.
He starts a GoFundMe. He changes their lives.
What strikes me most isn’t the money, though that matters. It’s the asking and the giving — the moment when a stranger trusts another stranger enough to say yes, here, take this. That instinct toward generosity, toward connection, toward kindness — it’s still there. In ordinary people, in hard circumstances, on social media of all places.
It didn’t go anywhere. We just have to look for it.
Kindness as a Slow Living Practice
I think there’s a connection between slow living and this kind of kindness that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Slow living asks you to be present. To notice what’s actually around you rather than moving through the world on autopilot. To pay attention to small things — the quality of the light, the taste of a tomato grown slowly, the sound of insects in a polytunnel on a summer morning.
That same quality of attention, turned toward other people — and toward animals — is where kindness lives.
I notice it in the way I am with my dogs. The walk that isn’t rushed. The moment of sitting outside together with no particular agenda. Animals ask for very little beyond presence and consistency, and giving them that fully — not half-distracted, not in a hurry to get back inside — is its own form of kindness. One that tends to come back to you immediately and without complication.
There is someone I follow on Instagram — Plumes, @plumesofficiel — who takes this further than most. He sits on a stool with his pink guitar and a microphone, and he sings for animals. For tigers and bears in a zoo. For giraffes. For cows standing in a field. He just plays, quietly and consistently, and the animals come closer. They sniff the guitar gently. They settle. They listen. The calm he brings to them is visible — and the calm they bring back to him is equally so.
The kindness moves in both directions. That’s what strikes me most about it. He gives them something — presence, music, gentleness — and they give him something back. Neither of them needed a reason. Neither of them needed a shared language. Just one creature showing up gently for another.
When you’re rushing — through your day, through your thoughts, through your assumptions about the world — other people, and the animals in your life, become background noise. When you slow down enough to actually look, they become something else. Specific. Individual. Worth your full attention.
The lift I give someone from the refugee camp takes maybe twenty minutes out of my day. What it gives back — a reminder that the world is more various and more human than the news suggests, a story I wouldn’t have heard any other way, the small warmth of having been useful to someone who needed it — lasts much longer than that.
The World Has Enough Cruelty
I don’t want to be heavy-handed about this. I’m not interested in telling anyone how to feel or what to think.
But I do believe this: the world has enough cruelty. It is loud and visible and constantly amplified. Kindness is quieter. It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t get screenshots taken of it and shared for outrage. It just happens, between two people, in a moment that most of the world never sees.
That’s exactly why it matters.
The kindness that costs something — the lift you didn’t have to give, the assumption you chose not to make, the moment you slowed down enough to see the person instead of the category — that’s the kind that changes things. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But steadily, in the small ways that actually add up.
I’m still learning how to do it well. I don’t always get it right. But I keep choosing it, imperfectly and deliberately, because the alternative — becoming someone who stopped trying — doesn’t sit well with me.
The world doesn’t need more cruelty. It has plenty.
It needs more people willing to be inconvenienced by kindness.