Doing the Kind Thing that Springs to Mind

The power of giving and walks outside in a hectic, tense, and uncertain time

Work intensity at school comes in cycles. In my library role, the stretch from my first day back until Thanksgiving is bananas. Days and nights whizz by in a swirl of start-up tasks, back-to-school events, professional development sessions, lesson plans, resource curation, research project launches, program kickoffs, and grading.

This year, we rolled out a 1:1 laptop program for freshmen, which added to the demands. Despite the pressure, I relish the tangible surge of anticipation among students and teachers, and the rush of completing each week’s must-dos, even though less visible administrative work is stacking up. I’ll get to that in December.

Yet, each fall, there are moments when I doubt that I can keep up, when anxiety, frustration, or both threaten to overwhelm me. This season is no exception.

But this time, two habits have been helping, one new, the other a habit I’ve been cultivating for a year now.

The new habit is simple: walking two laps around campus after the students’ lunch block. This brief shift from screens to sky, from fluorescent lights to sunlight, takes less than 15 minutes. Even on cloudy or rainy days, it refreshes me and restores my focus. Two days per week, a colleague joins me, her company and conversation like icing and rainbow sprinkles on this mini cupcake of a break.

I’m also striving to deepen the groove of a habit suggested in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a book I read last October: following through on impulses toward kindness. Amid the tumult of work demands, personal challenges, and increasing societal tension and uncertainty, practicing kindness steadies me, like a heading or bearing that keeps the horizon in view.

Whether it’s flowers for a relative struggling with illness or for the fitness instructor who showed up to teach shortly after a fall that required stitches above her eyebrow, an uplifting note to a colleague, or an extra donation to the food bank, doing the kind thing when it springs to mind, at least most of the time, prevents that molten glow inside me that flows toward human connection from crusting over with cynicism.

Twice in recent weeks people surprised me with similar kindnesses.

A neighbor, hearing that the auto-propel on our push mower had quit, something that transformed mowing into a full body workout, set out to fix it. He diagnosed the problem, ordered parts, and made the repairs. While he was at it, he changed the oil and decided it could use new front wheels.

When we insisted on reimbursing him, he refused. It’s one of the ways he spreads kindness. He’s a veteran and nurse who provides and coordinates at-home care for developmentally disabled adults. I can imagine the warmth and hope his kindness bring to his patients too.

The second surprise occurred at work. At a board meeting, a new educational leadership award, named in honor of our former director who died in February, had been presented. His wife and daughter attended the ceremony to accept a plaque honoring him as the award’s first recipient.

Grief, which had subsided in the busyness of opening school, superheated that molten core, burning past boundaries of time and mortality. I found myself on the precipice of tears several times that day, and felt as if my mounting to-dos were doing me in.

The next day, I stayed home to heal and to work. A caring text popped up on my phone midmorning, letting me know a friend had noticed how I was feeling. When I returned the next school day, an unexpected gift told me she was still holding me in the light.

Is it pain and loss that fuel our impulse toward kindness? Is it an inclination cultivated through a parent’s or mentor’s example, through stories we read or hear as children, or through the compass of faith? Does it blossom from that sense we’re connected to something much larger than us, a sense that gazing at the sky or trees can bring? I don’t know. But I believe in its quiet power.

Yet, despite this belief, sometimes I begrudge extending kindness to myself. When I picked up those small bouquets, smiling at their vibrant colors, I thought of the cheer they’d bring me, especially while my wife was on the road—and hesitated. Then I placed more flowers in my basket. As I ate dinner that night, their petals beamed, and I felt an answering warmth inside.

The small, colorful bouquet aglow in a beam of morning sun.

This week, even if it’s cloudy outside, consider taking a moment to stroll or roll around the block, or if that’s too far, maybe to the nearest street sign or mailbox. Notice the color of the sky, feel the air, nature’s breath, on your skin, tune in to the sounds around you. If you wish, invite a companion to come along.

And rather than worrying about how a kind gesture might be received or telling yourself you don’t have the time or energy to do the thing that your own inner glow is nudging you to do, consider following through.

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Here’s a poem for your pocket until the next post: Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.

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