On Kindness and Being Nice

Nice is what lawyers do in court to seem polite.
Kindness reveals the love people have towards other entities.

Since I was a toddler I’ve been admonished to “Be nice.”

I wanted to understand exactly what that term meant, because it seemed a blurry idea difficult to grasp. So I studied what people considered ‘nice’, how they behaved and reacted towards others.

What I’m seeing is that Nice is polite-speak for ‘getting along’ - only saying and doing things that will avoid offending other people. I’ve studied people who laid claim to Niceness, and my conclusion is that Nice is really about gentle lying, a method of communicating designed to avoid rustling feathers, smoothing the path between two entities. It seems to be a social agreement much like the way most congress-critters will say ‘the honorable Bill Plimpton’ in a speech, even though they do NOT consider Bill to actually BE honorable. It is a ‘public face’ presented so that things will look better than they are.

In my oddly shaped universe, it is polite-lying.

I did understand that most people prefer to not be rudely accosted regarding any aspect of their life they might take personally, making Niceness a tool to avoid anxiety and rage in others. But it is a tool no less, a political greasing of the skids to avoid friction. Niceness does NOT facilitate honest, valuable communication. We rarely used Niceness in the military - I suspect it did not convey sufficient data in a compact size.

I avoided being Nice for several decades following puberty (and involving military indoctrination), because I thought I wanted to be ‘more honest than that’. Eventually, Others wore me down (or successfully avoided me because I wasn’t nice enough) and I began to realize the need to avoid glaring irritations in communication between humans. However, this disingenuous Niceness seemed at odds with honest exchange. In my own warped way, I had to determine how to behave acceptably without resorting to lying to others so they would feel better (I still balk at the idea you should tell people they look good when they don’t…). I started rolling different ideas in my mind, and eventually I decided that Kindness was a far better way to behave.

Now, we all shape shift the words we learn, they gather moss and character as they age. I used to think being Nice and being Kind was the same thing. I’ve split those two terms in order to better grasp how to treat other humans without feeling like I’m deceiving them. I can be Kind and still tell the truth. In my twisted world, kindness involves your heart, and how you would want information/exchanges to flow, the delicate balance of imparting significant information using terms and affectations that indicate your emotional stance, gently.

To me, Kindness is reaching towards another with an open heart, a desire to communicate accurately, but with no malice. I can kindly tell someone bad news. Nice people often avoid the telling, or paint it in such a way that it does not contain the urgency or intensity required to accurately inform.