2023: Year in Review
Encounters with Kindness
I dropped a box of blueberries in Fairprice supermarket the other day. The box broke open. Ten, twelve, thirty pieces scattered on the floor, rolling in every direction. I heaved a sigh, set my shopping bag aside, stooped down, and started frantically picking them up one by one.
Moments later, I sensed someone else picking the fruits up beside me. Was it the cleaning staff perhaps? No, it was a tan-skinned boy, no older than eight, zooming around to help clean the mess I had made.
Opening up his tiny palms, he handed a dozen blueberries to me with a smile and jolted off.
It was a small, pure act of kindness —a boy lending a hand to a clumsy stranger. This encounter touched my soul but also confounded me. What is the incentive to help strangers you will likely never see again? Was the boy special, or do we all have this innate kindness but lose it along the way?
In prisoners’ dilemma simulations, the rational decision when playing a singular instance is to defect. Yet many humans choose to be kind to people they only meet once. The more I see the world, the more I see the boundless kindness of people — in stark contrast to the conflicts and wars that dominate the news these days.
As I traveled around Japan in December, I repeatedly encountered this kindness, this certain civility people show each other, this care for the collective.
On my way to Kanazawa station, I sat on the wrong train seat, and absent-mindedly left a crumpled tourist map in the seat pocket. As we stopped in one of the rural stations, a bespectacled man wearing a suit stepped in and flashed me his ticket. I was sitting on his seat. I jumped up, apologized, and moved to my seat on the row behind. Five minutes later, I saw the man digging out the crumpled piece of trash I forgot, compressing it, and placing it in his pocket. I felt ashamed, but also marveled at his care for the larger environment even at his inconvenience.
I was sitting alone in this izakaya bar in Kagoshima. The owner chatted me up in Japanese at first, followed by a smattering of English and Chinese. As he was recommending dishes to me, he cheerily introduced me to the other customers. Summoning my broken Japanese, I traded stories with two locals and two travelers from the Ishikawa region. We ended up sharing food, clinking our glasses, and taking photos together, partaking in an unforgettable night with kind people we will never see again.
Kindness is different from niceness. Being nice is easy and benefits the self; being kind can be difficult but benefits the other. The lines get blurry. I often wonder if I’m being kind or simply being nice, and I don’t know how much I’ll achieve, but I strive to be kinder, just like that boy in the supermarket.
(to be continued)
