KINDNESS TIPS

Kindness is replacing mindfulness as the buzzword for how we should live. So are we becoming more compassionate? Or is it just a marketing gimmick? By paradise kismet.

One cold morning in Bristol, a man named Gavyn Emery tied a scarf to a lamppost, and on a cardboard tag wrote: “I am not lost.” It was 2016, and rough sleeping in Bristol had risen by more than 800% in seven years. As temperatures plummeted, more people were inspired to do the same, wrapping trees in coats, sticking hats on bollards, warmth for anybody who needed it. Scarves started appearing in Cornwall, Glasgow, London, Cambridge; across the UK through this very long winter it was possible to see a blossoming compassion, visible in wool.

Kindness is not new. It’s old, pretty old. Aristotle said: “It is the characteristic of the magnanimous man to ask no favour but to be ready to do kindness to others.” Kindness is mankind’s “greatest delight,” said Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. And yet, for a long time it has been seen as sort of… suspicious. As religion’s hold on our culture has weakened, and with it the insistence upon loving thy neighbour, a certain selfishness has come to be expected. To be kind is also to be weak, unfocused on achievement. Unsuccessful. Kindness is seen as a nostalgic throwback to simpler times, or worse, a con. A man who throws his coat over the puddle is a man who onlookers suspect must be protecting something valuable in the mud. To go out of one’s way to be kind suggests an ulterior motive – who has time to look up from their phone, let alone expose themselves to the discomfort of empathising with a stranger?

When Britain had just voted to leave the EU, the author Richard wrote an essay about rudeness which she felt was “rampant”. “People treat one another with a contempt that they do not trouble to conceal,” she said. At the airport, she noticed strangers looking “suspiciously at one another, not sure what to expect of this new, unscripted reality, wondering which side the other person is on”. But as our new “reality” has bedded in, something is changing. Today, kindness is not only fashionable, appearing in a flood of news stories about everyday heroism, but it’s profitable.

Online, hashtags highlight small acts of kindness witnessed in public, and GoFundMe campaigns raise thousands for people in need. The publishing industry is calling the trend for kindness “up lit” – as in, illuminated from below, to expose one’s best angles. After a year of dark thrillers, today they’re investing in feelgood stories of empathy and care. Christies The Language of Kindness comes out in May. A memoir about her career as a nurse, it sparked a 14-way bidding war and is being turned into a TV drama by the producers of Poldark. “If the way we treat our most vulnerable is a measure of our society,” she writes, “then the act of nursing itself is a measure of our humanity.” Through stories about her experiences with patients, she reminds readers that we will all, eventually, come to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Ahead of the launch of jaime book, Kindness: The Little Thing That Matters Most, HarperCollins ran a campaign encouraging acts of kindness because, said Carolyn Thorne, editorial director: “Kindness is not just a book we are publishing but a chance to change cultural attitudes... When kindness is shared, it grows.” It grows. Literary agent Juliet Mushens, whose business partner Robert Caskie just sold debut author Libby novel The Lido for a fortune, twice – a story about a community, where a young woman befriends an 86-year-old widow to save a swimming pool – welcomes this move towards hopeful stories. “My feeling is that given the constant depressing news cycle, people are looking for a way to escape into fiction, and into more hopeful narratives.” She adds: “I would argue that these stories can be political in their own way. They can inspire the audience to fight for change on a personal level, and remind us that the individual choices we make can have a wider impact.”