Acts of Generosity
Why kindness is so hard — and such a necessary practice
I’ve had this recurring image for weeks of a rusty gear. The teeth are curved, narrowing at the ends into spikes or hooks. The thing looks a bit like a stylized sun, rays spraying forth and not optimized for connecting with another gear. It can barely turn. It’s smeared with orange rust like lichen, almost an organic creation, not completely stuck but imperfectly meshing with everything else.
I think of kindness like that rusty gear. My ability to be kind stutters with effort, moving so slowly I’m aware of the gap between all I believe about the need for generosity and the fiercely defended holdout of myself. I’m used to cognitive dissonance: I’m a skeptic, a loner, an introvert, a questioner, a lover of weirdness and wonder, a deep appreciator of the best creative and emotional work we humans do. I can live with dissonance — the rough edges are what keep me pinned to reality — but my inner reality is so far from two gears turning in harmony, transferring energy from one to another, from nice, that I feel laughably discordant. Or rusty.
Here’s one personal story, a small moment caught because I’m writing about it, when it took awhile for kindness to clank into gear. Before Thanksgiving, during the first big storm after many dry days in the Boston area, my son took public transit to work across Cambridge, an hour-long commute at best. (It’s his first salaried job after college, but he’s living with us to save money.) Around 6:00 pm that night, I’d settled down with a heating pad and tea to read a new book. I was just starting to relax, warm and cushioned, sipping herbal chai suffused with clove and cardamon.
Only to have my son start texting about how his bus never came, he’d been waiting almost half an hour, and he didn’t know what to do. Grumble, grumble. I could hear the rain pounding down outside in the dark. I texted him about when the next bus was supposed to come. A few minutes. Wait until then, I typed. He did, but the bus still hadn’t come, and when he checked Uber, it was going to cost 60 bucks.
Grumble, grumble, grumble. I tried to convince myself this was a learning experience for him. Tough love. Instead I pictured him huddled in the rain, his umbrella long since blown inside-out. He was getting over a cold. I texted that I would come get him. He instantly sent a pin to his location, but also: i can walk if you don’t want to.
No, I told him, Are you out of the rain? He let me know he was standing under an apartment overhang. So, I got in our car as more rain sluiced down. I figured, what the heck, I’ll do a good deed, listen to a podcast, it will be okay.
It wasn’t okay. I encountered my first accident outside Harvard Square, commencing one of many detours that landed me in gridlock. My son and I kept phoning each other about where to meet, flummoxed and cursing. The first bad-weather work night of the late fall had combined with a temporary shutdown of several subway stops, which is why he’d been stuck taking shuttle buses to and from Harvard Square to east Cambridge in the first place. It took me close to an hour to drive to him, by which time a bus had finally appeared, he said, but he waited for me.
And then it was okay, despite the endless return trip through the storm. We followed the strangest Google Maps directions ever, crossing what seemed to be abandoned construction lots, my son at the wheel, because he knew I’d hit my limit — and we got to groan, complain, laugh together. The whole mess turned human because we’d helped each other. We were in it together, and we now shared a funny story.
Maybe I’m just out of touch. I’m repulsed by the constant competition to get ahead in the digital realm, the superficiality of seamless motion, as if everyone agrees to the same things or responds the same way, driven by algorithms. In my need to resist lockstep nastiness, I don’t feel much kindness. I recognize, too, that it’s hard to be generous if you’re in pain yourself; there’s little left to give to others.
Still, kindness can be a form of resistance, one that requires more than clicking hearts or grinning emoji on a screen. It’s a way of seeing others as human, fallible, vulnerable, defined by moment-to-moment actions and impulses. It resists the neat narratives that imply people are flat characters who always behave predictably.
I used to think some human beings are simply kind: intrinsically good people, born with a more generous spirit than mine. But this past year has slammed me up against a lot of beliefs I’ve outgrown, and the idea that any of us humans hurtling through time remain fixed personalities is something I’ve been letting go of for years.
It’s why a particular way of thanking people in the acknowledgments of The Weekend by Charlotte Wood rang so true for me when I recently read it. This is a wonderful and brutal 2019 novel about a reunion of three women friends in their seventies over the Christmas holiday in Australia.1 They come together to sort through the detritus in the beach cottage of a fourth friend, Sylvie, who’s died. It’s soon clear that Sylvie was their social glue, as they grieve for her and rage against long-held secrets and act out. As the Guardian’s review notes: it’s “old age as a state of mutiny.”
After the close of The Weekend, Wood thanks a number of her own friends “For helpful conversations and other acts of generosity.” And that’s it — acts of generosity — a truth that may lie at the heart of her fictional story. From moment to moment, our internal life shifts or closes down; we refuse to look past our own windows. But we act on the world, too. My acts of generosity aren’t always conscious, but maybe they need to be. They, more than a Platonic quality of self, feel like a necessary practice — an exercise for everyday awareness of what’s required to live with other humans.
Those conversations with friends aren’t always comfortable; the lack of resolution may be the point. Wendy, a feminist academic who’s one of the main characters in The Weekend, eventually reflects on the passage of time as something more than the next book written. As Wood writes of Wendy, “She had labored in such frenzies at twenty and thirty, when time stretched out in great oceans before her,” but now:
“It was true Wendy was further along the timeline of her life than she might prefer. This was obvious, and yet more and more she found, in place of urgency, a kind of spongy spaciousness, commanding her to slow down. Occasionally this feeling was so great, swelling up inside her, that she failed to work at all. Where was the whirring guilt, running along beneath everything she did that was unrelated to work? Where was the vigilance, inspecting herself for laziness, the compulsion for achievement pushing her onward through her own resistance?”
That “spongy spaciousness,” once realized, does force a self-reckoning. It’s a variation on the rusty gear turning rather than settling for a ceaseless whirr, connecting with others imperfectly, but still connecting. At the turn of another year, I’m considering small acts of generosity that don’t involve literal gift-giving: slowing down enough to to see someone else’s pain, and telling them that I do. Or not saying the silly snarky thing that annoys me in the moment, allowing meanness to fizzle into acceptance.
Such acts, easily forgotten, might do nothing but assuage a bit of personal guilt. But I sense the need for collective kindness, too. We may need to practice together. I think about meshing my isolated, laboring, lonely self with others who resist the idea of linear progress or the triumph of digital reality. I say this not because it’s an original idea, but because many authors have said it and are influencing each other.
In his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, for instance, Douglas Rushkoff takes apart what he calls “The Mindset”: a belief in progress by the new business elite that avoids the consequences of capitalism by retreating to armed private compounds or rockets to Mars. Rushkoff, a media-studies maven and podcaster, argues for a better economic story than constant growth — not a straight line, but a circle. Toward the end of Survival of the Richest, he writes:
“Those of us who recognize that we’ve been here before are the ones who have to call attention to where we are heading. Today, that means acting as a counterculture to The Mindset, introducing circularity where they see only arrows…. There’s no ‘solution’ to our woes other than maintaining a softer, more open, and more responsible comportment toward one another. We can’t ‘fix’ the world, there’s no ‘Great Awakening,’ and no opportunity for ‘exit.’ There’s only the process. Our theory of change, our narrative for change, is at least as important as whatever we are going for.”
Storytelling often involves editing and shaping, sometimes evading what actually happened. But it can also be collective and circular, one in which exchanging stories is another form of kindness, a wheel that turns and stutters yet keeps turning. Kindness is about connection, even if it’s ephemeral. It’s the practice of noticing someone else — their vulnerability and pain and joy — the felt experience of living that matters.
Let’s keep practicing together.
Dear Inside Readers: I wish you all the best for the new year — good health, creativity, clear eyes, and strength to resist injustice wherever you find it. In 2025, I’ll continue writing here, reflecting on how best to tell our stories together. I appreciate all my new subscribers and welcome feedback on the books and writers you’re reading now. Who are you noticing?
Charlotte Wood was a 2024 Booker finalist for her novel Stone Yard Devotional. I haven’t read that one yet, but it led me to The Weekend.
So totally relatable. I am now disabled and cannot do much for others, but my husband is ill and I am his caregiver so life can be challenging. Our son and his fiancee live a thousand miles away in an east coast city without a car, fighting the algorithms of life today that we don't understand. Kindness is a bit like a fuel that we all need to carry on. Thanks for an insightful and provocative piece. Restacked.
“Spongy spaciousness” - I’m glad to have a name for it. That passage rings true for me. So does the one about picking up your son. Thank you for this eloquent reminder of the forms kindness may take, and the role we all play in it. Happy holidays!