Kindness Is

Somewhere this morning, a person crouched at the edge of a swimming pool, lifting beetles, bees and spiders out of the water with their hands. No one saw them do it. It changed nothing about the day except everything about the person standing in it.

We have been thinking about kindness. Not the greeting-card kind, which is really sentimentality — and sentimentality is kindness with the specifics removed. Real kindness is nearly always specific. It has a time, a place, and usually a slightly odd shape: holding the elevator when you are already late. Leaving the leaf pile unraked because you know the lizards sleep there. Letting the person with three items go ahead of your full cart.

Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Every example above is an act of noticing before it is an act of anything else. Psychology arrives at the same place: researchers who study prosocial behaviour keep finding that small, deliberate acts of kindness measurably lift the wellbeing of the person performing them — more reliably, in some studies, than doing something nice for yourself. Kindness runs in the opposite direction to how we picture it. The giver keeps more than they give.

Ecopsychology takes the idea one step further. If we are part of nature rather than separate from it, then the circle of beings who can receive our kindness is far larger than we usually draw it. Aldo Leopold called this enlarging the boundaries of the community: soils, waters, plants, animals. The spider in the pool. The lizards under the leaves.

So we asked our community — including a few beekeepers, naturalists, and gardeners — to complete one sentence: Kindness is… Their answers are coming here and to our channels over the season ahead. They are specific, and a little strange, which is how we knew they were true.

How would you finish the sentence? We would genuinely like to know.