How to Kind

 When I first started thinking about this podcast, I considered calling it "How to Kind", the point, being that telling people to be kind doesn't feel very instructive. I tend to believe that kindness is less a state of being and more a state of doing. One of my favorite short stories ever is called "Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz" by George Saunders. I'll post a link to it and you should definitely give it a read. At the end of the story, he uses the phrase, "did a kindness,"  "You did a kindness for someone in need". And I just love that way of saying it.  

But the thing about doing a kindness is you actually have to do it in order to make a difference. You can think of yourself as kind all you want. But if you don't put it into action in the real world, it doesn't really matter. In fact, I'm sure there are many people who honestly consider themselves to be kind.  But if you were to really look at the sum total of their actions, and how they live and how they spend their money and how they treat their fellow humans in the world around them, you might find out that they end up on the unkind end of the ledger. So this week, we're going to look at ways to transform the noun, kindness or the adjective, kind into the verb "to kind", the act of doing a kindness. Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we've all been conned into accepting a human culture that doesn't reflect our human nature. And how together we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind. 

As I was researching this podcast, I read a couple of really interesting studies about how we in general undervalue the impact of doing kindnesses for other people. 

There was this 2023 study by Nicholas Epley and Amit Kumar from the University of Chicago business school, where they asked people to perform a random act of kindness and then report their own experience and predict the recipient's reaction. They found that both givers and receivers felt significantly better after the exchange. And also that recipients rated the kindness as bigger, as more impactful, than the givers themselves had anticipated. And on top of that, there's a pay it forward effect that people don't anticipate. This was found in a 2017 study out of the University of Cambridge that found that kindness receivers paid their gift forward with an almost 300% increase in prosocial behavior.

So when we hesitate to do a kindness for someone, maybe it's because we just don't realize how big an impact we can have on other people, just by doing tiny little nice things for them, and that they will then do for other people. And it will kind of snowball. And that's a real shame. I mean, I think many, if not most people today are desperate to have a positive impact on the world, around us. And we don't realize that there are countless opportunities we're missing every day to do just that.

I think that if people understood how easy it really is to have a positive impact on the world, conversely, they might also realize how easy it is to have a negative impact on the world, and we might all do a better job lessening our negative impacts as well as increasing our positive impacts. And when you think about it, it's really tragic for people to believe that they don't have an impact on the world one way or the other. And when people are convinced to believe that, they tend not to really interrogate the consequences of their actions In either the positive or negative directions.  I used to really blame people for.. In particular, not taking into account the negative consequences of their actions. But now I realize those people are really just victims of a world that tells them all day, every day, that they don't really matter, their actions don't make a difference. And we've all internalized that to some degree. And to that extent, it's, it's not really our fault. Or at least it wasn't, but now that we know what's going on, it will be our fault if we don't do something different about it. 

So even though I didn't settle on "How to Kind" as the title of this podcast, the goal remains the same. To show as many people as possible that they can change the world for the better. It might seem like a tiny thing to hold a door for someone or give your leftover food to someone who's hungry or just smile at someone who sees nothing but anger or fear in other people's eyes all day long.  To convince people that those things count. They really do make a difference and then it all adds up to a better world, regardless of what the people say, who try to convince us that everyone's just an asshole, so you better look out for yourself and never let your guard down, we better get whatever we can before someone else takes it from us. But with each tiny act of kindness, we push back on that notion and allow the truth that we are not just a bunch of greedy narcissistic assholes to gain a little more traction. 

Now I could continue to make the rational case for the truth about our good human natures and the positive impact of doing kindnesses for each other, but there happens to be a poem that was written just a few years ago that does a much better job than I ever could. And that brings me to my guests this week. Danusha Laméris is the former poet Laureate of Santa Cruz, California, which is just the most fabulous-sounding job title ever.  

Her work has appeared in among many other places, the Best American Poetry Collection and the New York Times. Her third book, Blade by Blade, is coming out later this year. And I'm so excited to talk to her. 

Craig:
Welcome, Danusha. Thanks so much for joining me on The Great Ungaslighting. 

Danusha:
Oh, thanks so much, Craig.  I'm so happy to be here and kind of amazed to hear that that poem may have had something to do. With the origins of your podcast. 

Craig:
I can't wait to tell you about it.  So I'm not a gasper, like I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've audibly gasped in my life. Two of the times have happened relatively recently one was when I was watching the movie One Night in Miami and it hit me that the serious song that Sam Cooke was working on was "A Change Is Gonna Come" and I was like,  it's that song.

The other time recently was a couple of years ago when I read Small Kindnesses for the first time. Now, I don't want to give away too much so that listeners who haven't read the poem already can enjoy it as much as I did when I read it for the first time. So Danusha, I would ask you to start us off if you would be so kind to read "Small Kindnesses" for us.

Danusha:
Oh, sure thing. I love that you started with a little bit of a teaser. It's like we have a setup about gasping and more more to be revealed, you know, I like a little mystery too. So yeah, this is a poem I wrote, gosh, back in 2017 and I look forward to talking more about the how and what and where of it. But really, it's just a poem I wrote quite quickly in my living room. about some of the things I've been thinking, which is more or less how the poem begins.

 Small Kindnesses  
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

Craig:
It's such a wonderful experience hearing you read that I just got a smile on my face  Do you generally have a positive view of your fellow humans or was writing this poem something that helped you discover or rekindle a sense of goodwill for humankind?  

Danusha:
I like to say I'm a liker because I, I tend to have a positive bent toward people and things, you know, I tend to start out open, not closed. And I don't necessarily think that's a better way to be. I have friends who are more discerning  and start out closed and are like, okay, when I feel good, I'm going to give this person a chance.

So. Both ways of being are fully functioning ways of being,  but I tend to be a liker, but like anybody alive and alive right now,  I also have been really affected by just seeing such difficult things in the world and a kind of tribalism in the sense that we don't want  a real riff in this country.

And that's, it's in that context that I wrote the poem. Actually, somebody in a pickup truck had cut me off and said something unsavory to let me know that while he might have let somebody else pass whose skin was not the color of mine, didn't want to do that for me.  And I, so that was an initiating event.

But, you know, I thought, mostly that doesn't happen.  That doesn't define my days. Mostly people are kind and going, Hey, go ahead. Oh, you dropped that. Let me get it for you. I wasn't going to let that one moment diminish the other moments of which there are dozens all the time. 

And then I realized how much I love those little moments when you're joking with the checker in the grocery line and just talking about, I don't even know what,  but having these little moments of joy, especially as then we entered into the pandemic, this was written before then.  But I came to really appreciate those things like most of us did even more.

Craig:
Did you have a sense when you were writing it that this poem would impact readers so powerfully? 

Danusha:
No. I mean, it was laughably in the opposite direction, Craig, and I'm, I wrote it, you know, just sort of in my living room in a few minutes. I turned to my husband and said, Hey, can I read you something?

I read it to him and I said, I don't know that I'm even going to send this out for publication. It just seems like a note to my friends. I think I'll just put it on social media.  And I put it on Facebook. And I edited it one or two more times after I, you know, I edited my post a little like going, Oh, I think that's a repeat word there.

And, and I, and I didn't think anything, you know, of it. Hmm.  And I think it's one of those things where there are things we work for and we try to do.  There are a lot of poems I try to write that I work on. And then maybe a couple, few times a decade, there's something That you don't try. And those are the ones that are much more impactful, though.

I can't take much credit for it. Nor do I need to. I mean, it just,  I'm grateful that it's something that starts conversation maybe even encourages us to initiate more of those moments with people we don't know. Myself included. It's a reminder to me.  But sort of an accidental reminder, you know, 

Craig:
So, for me, I find magic in this poem.  And I'll kind of explain what I mean by that. it starts off rather simply and you think, well, this is nice, she's going to share a list of sort of pleasant anecdotes for us to just think about. But then almost halfway through you have this line, "mostly we don't want to harm each other". And that was the first one that kind of got my attention that there's something deeper going on here.

At first, it feels like, well, okay, she's kind of, she's kind of set a low bar for us there. But then you realize, no, it's enough to save us, you know, if we can all understand that mostly we don't want to harm each other. That's a big deal. Like we can actually live together  in that world regardless of how we feel sort of moment to moment, like with the guy who cut you off and all those other little things that grasp our attention more than the simple fact that mostly we don't want to harm each other.

And then. Later on, there's the line, "we have so little of each other now, so far from tribe and fire".  And that's the part that kind of really gets at what this podcast is about. It's that disconnect between our current human culture and our true human nature. And there's a suggestion in that line that we've been in that place where we have more of each other and we can get back to a place where we have more of each other. 

And then there's the line that I gasped at, which is, " what if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together", and that to me was, I think about like my high school English classes where we were studied poetry and I didn't really get it, but it felt to me like at that precise moment this collection of words that you put together kind of magically transformed into a powerful work of art like it changed my view of reality in whatever it is ten words, revealing like that those small nice moments that we barely even think about they are  the potentially transformative bastions of humanity and it was almost like looking and seeing like sort of a parallel reality that we don't really notice and it's just the fleeting temples line, I just think is kind of stunning and I'm curious,  did that just appear like sort of in your mind's eye as the way to tie it all together and think about this, or was there a, was there a process of getting to that moment?

Danusha:
I love the question and I love you pointing toward those fleeting temples because to me that's the heart of so much. I, I didn't you know, again, have much of a process in the writing because it just wrote it.

So quickly, I think I still have the scribbles somewhere.  So there wasn't a process of thinking or waiting. It was just like this, you know, Oh, this is what's in my head. Just wrote it through but it's kind of funny. I thought about it later and went Oh, what's that thing? I always used to tell people I used to joke that, you know, here we build up these elaborate systems of thought and morality and religion, and that we build all these things up, and I thought, well, what if when you die, there is an angel that has recorded your deeds, and it's actually just looking at how you've behaved in traffic.

Mm hmm. And I just thought, that was an amusing thought to me, of what if all of our attention was elsewhere, and what mattered was, did you let the guy, You know, into your lane.  Did you honk your horn and road rage over nothing?  And so I had been saying that for years on occasion, well, what if that's what really matters how you were in traffic?

And so I think it must have been something that I was mulling over for a long time is what if our attention is in the wrong place on sort of the trying to be good in these big ways that sometimes cause us to actually cause harm against whole groups of people that follow a different religion or believe things other than what we believe, you know,  and so it's something I've definitely been thinking about, but the language of poetry is so much better at holding that kind of thing than my offhand remarks about traffic but I, I think I try to return to that myself.

You know, what if, what if there's the opportunity to make these little temples together that don't depend upon us sharing ideologies, but it really depends upon that innate urge we have most of the time to be good to one another. 

Craig:
Did you get any pushback from religious folks about potential blasphemy in thinking of it this way? 

Danusha:
Never. I've really only had a number of religious personages reach out to me to ask if they could use it in their services whether Zen monks or rabbis or pastors, you know, just a lot of people who lead services. So that was a very unexpected outcome for me as somebody who thought, Oh, here's a little something I wrote practically on a napkin in a few minutes.

I thought I was so surprised at how could matter to people who are holding those roles. And I'm really honored by that. 

Craig:
Yeah, absolutely.  I've returned to this poem pretty consistently and it's sort of like a meditation for me, it's a reminder to pay attention to those small kindnesses that happen all the time.

Do you find that you can do that pretty easily given your nature and your experience with that or does it take some work to do you like the rest of us kind of take those things for granted? 

Danusha:
I think maybe less So since the pandemic just because we were so isolated in that time and also because the sort of rhetoric You know politically and otherwise has become so loud that I think in a way, just circumstance of these years has really pointed me toward going, no, but look how it is interacting with actual humans.

I'm kind of scared of flying.  And I'm getting over it. I fly places,  but the first flight I'd done in a while was at some point. Oh, gosh, some years back. And there was the dreaded thing, a crying baby, you know, that everybody goes, Oh, God, not a crying baby. And it was only about an hour and a half long flight, you know, not not a big deal.

I can't tell you how much sweetness and fun all the people sitting around this crying baby were bringing to the situation, men, women holding the baby, making faces at the baby, you know and, and, and cheering this baby up.  And by the time we landed, there was sort of a triumph of we made the baby laugh.

And, you know, it was a collective effort. And the mom who'd been traveling alone.  I believe with two kids was so happy and I just thought, see, this is what we can do on earth or in the sky, you know, but we can come together and bring each other a little, a little bit of ease and I'm sure that that made that woman's day that a collective of people did that rather than you know what, what they could have done, you know, scowl said, Can you, can you deal with that, you know, you know, we know where, where that could go.

So I do think I noticed those things more now. Are we more prone to them now, too, since the pandemic? What do you think about that? Do you think that culturally we're turning that way a little bit?  

Craig:
I hope so. It feels like I, going into the pandemic, I thought, well, this is going to be a huge cultural shift in the country.

This is the opportunity to really come together. And for obvious reasons, it didn't really happen to the extent that I think is necessary. For us to really move forward in a positive way, I, I do think for a lot of people there was a reassessment of a lot of fundamental thoughts and ways of living, 

We had such a dramatic shift that I think a lot of people were thinking, do, do I really want to get back to normal? Like what was normal in 2019 or do I really want to interrogate what was normal in 2019 and decide?  There are some things that were normal that I really didn't like that I, I'd like to create a new normal that excludes those things. And that's what the kind of point of the podcast is, is to, is to figure out these ways of looking at things that we've taken for granted or things that are sort of in our human culture that we've lived within our entire lives and just thought of as normal and think, well, you know, they're not necessarily normal if you look at the broad scope of human history.

So I'm, you know, I'm weirdly optimistic, you know. 

Danusha:
I love that phrase. Weirdly optimistic, I think is what we all need to be. Unreasonably somewhat weirdly, or I like to say, even though, even though fill in the blank, I'm weirdly optimistic. Yeah. Right, because there, there is hope for us, we do change and have changed in our, in both of our lifetimes, I'm sure we can look at a lot of issues that have advanced a great deal over the course of our lifetime areas where there's innovation in medicine areas where there's more understanding about different groups of people and And needs of different people.

I mean, I think that we've really advanced tremendously in so many ways. And yet, you know, we, we have, we have a ways to go. We got work ahead of us. 

Craig:
Exactly.  So one of the small kindnesses that I like to engage in as consistently as I can is supporting local businesses around where I live. Like I've started using cash more for the small businesses cause I know they're really getting squeezed by credit card fees and stuff like that, you know, and  I want these guys to, to hang around cause I like them in my neighborhood. 

And one of the things I like to ask my writer guests is if they have a favorite local bookstore especially for you, you've got a new book coming out and I'd love to hear if you have a date on that, but I'm just wondering if you have a favorite local bookstore that you'd like to give a shout out to.

Danusha:
Absolutely. And thanks for asking that.  I live in, you know, again, Santa Cruz, California, and the heart of our community here is Bookshop Santa Cruz.  And it has survived flood and fire, well, not fire maybe, but fire, except on the, on the perimeter of town  and, but really earthquake. It had a location when I moved to town that disappeared that was felled by an earthquake  and it reemerged  in the center of town and has been just a mainstay for us.

So Bookshop Santa Cruz, you can order books from them and they will send them. I believe they're still doing that. They started doing that during the pandemic and they're just wonderful. So if you come to Santa Cruz too, that's an absolute must. Stop destination for anybody coming through town and it's yeah, right downtown on Pacific Avenue.

Craig:
Cool. I will definitely post a link to them in the show notes for this episode. And thank you, Danusha, so much for sharing your time with us and for creating this wonderful, powerful work of art that you have.  

Danusha:
Well, thank you so much. I don't know that I really did it, but it arrived on my plate.  And so I'm, I'm grateful for that. And just to be able to have conversations like this one. 

Craig:
Absolutely. Anytime.

 So this week. When you're living your life out there in the world, I want you to do two things. First, pay attention to when people are offering small kindnesses to each other. And it really doesn't matter how small.  It was kind of like a bunch of years ago, I found myself in a shitty place mentally, and I did this retreat where they talked about experiencing gratitude. 

And I was like, well, what if everything is shitty?  And the answer was to lower the bar low enough so that you can genuinely find gratitude, even if it's in the tiniest of things. Just the fact that you could physically lift yourself out of bed. The fact that those trees are kind of pretty, that you can walk without pain, whatever, no matter how small it is,  take a moment to appreciate it. And the same goes for small kindnesses. It doesn't matter how small and seemingly insignificant. They all count. When we're constantly told that human beings are a bunch of greedy narcissistic assholes, even the slightest positive interaction is a data point that begins to prove that we're not all a bunch of greedy narcissistic assholes.  Someone who lets another person take the next shopping cart at the supermarket. A car that lets somebody merge, notice those things. They are the good things that we choose to do for each other. And they all count. 

The second thing is to engage in small kindnesses yourself. If you see someone with a cool hat. Tell them you like it. If you can tell someone is having a tough day, let them go ahead of you in line or let them know that you've been in their shoes and things will get better. You'll be amazed at how good it will make you feel. 

You're creating one of those fleeting temples that Danusha talked about. And I can assure you that little gesture will have positive impacts on the world that you won't even know about. But you can be sure are happening. 

Now, just a quick disclaimer to the guys out there. This is not an excuse to hit on women. That negates whatever kindness you may have offered. These are acts of kindness that expect nothing in return. Okay. 

So if there is an attractive woman with a cool hat, just tell her you like her hat and move on. Not only will she most likely appreciate the comment. She will also appreciate the fact that all it was was a nice comment.  

Well, that's it for this week. I really hope you get lots of opportunities to do some small kindnesses out there. They really make a difference. So until next week, be kind to yourself cut each other, some slack, and when you do have to drive, drive nice and honk twice and use your damn turn signal. See you all next week.