stop. start. stutter.

I think sometimes, in writing my characters -- in creating these people who walk around inside my head and on the page -- about kindness.

See, there are three interlocking concepts -- "nice", "kind", and "good" -- that most modern Western society treats as the same concept. I've heard a lot of people use the words synonymously, and I'm just as guilty as anyone else. They're not the same concepts, though. They recognize and inform each other, and they interrelate and pass pieces back and forth, but they're not the same. Treating them like they are does everything a disservice.

(In order to talk about a lot of this, I have to either wave my hands and start using synaesthetic words, or take you through a whirlwind tour of religious and philosophical writing since the Ancient Greeks. I'll go with the hand-waving, since I'm still dealing with the dislocated thumb and probably shouldn't even be typing this much.)

Being "nice" involves being pleasant and agreeable, being courteous, and being nice is important. But sometimes there's an element of falseness in it. There's an implication of vapidity, of shallowness, to the modern definition of "nice". Call it the darker side of nice: the part where the social pressure involves smiling pretty and saying meaningless lies while you ready the dagger to slip between someone's ribs.

But being kind lies in understanding and recognizing that we all hurt each other without wanting to, and seeking to mitigate that damage as much as possible. Kindness has to do with compassion; it has to do with empathy. It has to do with seeking to take a moment and view the world from someone else's viewpoint, and doing things for them that aren't how you personally would do them, aren't what you personally would need at that moment, but are what that person needs.

(It's the Sephirotic concept of chesed, really, which is often rendered in English as "mercy", but which is probably better translated as "lovingkindness" -- and it might take the form of an outstretched hand and it might take the form of complete silence or distance. It is, as one of the wisest men I've ever met says, the importance of recognizing the inherent dignity of every living being.)

In a lot of ways, kindness isn't a Western concept. Which is not to say that Westerners can't be kind. But inherent to the concept of kindness, or at least kindness as I'm sort of fumbling around with it, is the notion of non-self-centrism, and that's something that's very unfamiliar to the modern American mind. "Nice" is a model of the world where the individual performing the action is the center of that action. When you're thinking about being nice, a lot of times you're thinking about I, I, me -- what I need to do right here to be perceived as a "nice person". "Kind" is a model of the world where you have to actively engage with the other people around you -- to place your situational partner's needs and wants and reactions ahead of your own, and do things that will minimize their hurt and maximize their healing.

Kindness isn't easy. It's scary and it's frightening and it means that you have to stomp down your initial impulses half the time, because no two people have the same needs and wants and reactions at any given time. It involves a lot of listening, and a lot of giving, and a lot of struggle.

The world needs more kindness in it. (And sometimes less nice. Because often, being nice and being kind are actively in opposition.)

I'm not nice, and I'm not interested in being nice; I never have been, I never will be. And sometimes I'm good, and sometimes I'm not. But I always, always try to be kind, even when I'm doing something that isn't nice or isn't good. I don't always succeed, but it's important to me to try.

As a writer, I often have to write people who aren't nice or good or kind. It's important, though, for any writer to remember that nobody's a villain in the story of his own life, and nobody wakes up in the morning and looks herself in the mirror and says "yeah, I'm so evil". Every single human being I've ever met has been capable of moments of incredible kindness back-to-back with moments of incredible cruelty and moments of incredible carelessness, and fictional people who don't have the same depths to them ring flat and one-dimensional.

More than that, though, it's important for me to treat my characters with kindness -- even if they're not kind people. Even when they're doing awful things, I need to treat them sympathetically, even if they're not sympathetic characters; I need to respect their dignity. If I don't, it creeps into the text, and a reader winds up looking at the result and feeling like something's horribly wrong.

It's a hard problem to struggle with, and like so many of these meandering little essays, it's one I don't have a nice neat solution for. (I'm actually wondering if one of the problems I'm having with the main project right now is that I'm not being kind enough to one of the protagonists. Yes, Joey, I'm looking at you.) It's just something I've been thinking about lately as I try to explain my life philosophy to a few friends...