Kindness
As the focus of the paper is virtues, it is essential to mention Aristotle and his concept of a golden mean represented in The Nicomachean Ethics: “Each moral virtue is a mean or lies between extremes of pleasure or of action – doing or feeling too much or too little. The absolute mean is different from the mean as it is relative to the individual” (Homepages, n. d.). Kindness is a special virtue that would be on the list of the most honored virtues if such a list existed. It is not difficult to define kindness, with the opposite of it being rudeness, harshness, even animosity, or hostility. Another extreme of kindness can be too much kindness like fondness.
It is obvious that rudeness is easier than kind-heartedness. Every person can be rude, which is a sign of their feeling insecure and weak. Kindness requires natural inclination, great work on self-discipline, and strong self-esteem. In society, however, it can be hard to detect people who are mean or others who are nice because people combine both negative and positive traits. Sometimes, they can be rude, sometimes openhearted, though they may have a powerful inclination to one pole. When asking people about their friends or other people they know, they may have a problem to specify them either good or bad. People tend to consider those whose company they enjoy to be nice and agreeable. In a full sense of the word, kindness means being friendly, helpful, emphatic, and compassionate to people, giving them attention in ways that makes them happy and pleased. Kindness is a sort of altruistic behavior but in their nature, human creatures are selfish and egoistic.
Recently, I have encountered an interesting article in The New York Times, “The Exchange: Kindness for Rudeness.” The story goes about Darcey, a young, 21-year-old student with literary pretensions, who is currently in her junior year in Ireland. She tells about her being too arrogant to hang out with her roommates, plump girls one of which annoyed Darcey the most. That girl named Karen was an adopted child and conversations with her had always been circling around her childhood and an invented image of a movie star as her birth mother. At the same time, Darcey’s parents did not have much money. Her mother was a housewife and her father was a minister. The parents sent their daughter 30$ for food each week.
However, Darcey managed to spend all her money and often had nothing to eat. Karen was a wonderful cook. Darcey ate everything she cooked, though she did not admit that she liked dishes cooked by Karen. Once Karen made a delicious roast chicken and when the next morning she found that it had been almost eaten, she said, “Looks like a little mouse got into my leftovers” (Steinke, n. d.). Thus, the girl became more and more irritated with her plump housemate Karen, because she felt obliged to her. Besides, Karen possessed such traits as pragmatism, conservatism, and stability, as compared to Darcey. Despite the fact that the storyteller participated in a poetry club, she usually stayed alone. Her boyfriend studied a lot and needed to spend much time on his own. Darcey said that she usually spent her time “trying to read John Donne’s poetry and listening for familiar American songs on my little transistor radio” (Steinke, n. d.).
On Christmas Eve, Karen and Darcey had a tour to London, specifically the British Museum. Darcey tried to stay away from Karen as long as possible. Luckily to her, she came across her US roommate and they were looting around the art cinema and record stores. Meantime, Karen felt really pleased and delighted. She was cheered up because of seeing the Rosetta Stone and the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Her self-sufficiency was unlimited. Darcey grew mad at Karen’s attitude. When they went back to the hostel, the haughty girl decided to phone home from a telephone booth, “I’d heard from my brother that my mom and dad weren’t getting along, and I could tell by their pinched voices that both of them were miserable. My coins ran out while my mom was in midsentence” (Steinke, n. d.). Outside the booth on an almost empty, deserted street of London, Darcey felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. She threw up and spent the night lying on the cold floor of the hostel bathroom heaving up bile. Waking up on the Christmas Day, feeling herself sore and fetid, standing in need of a hot bath, Darcey called Karen for help. The tub was three flights to go down, and it was impossible to get there without Karen’s support. Karen’s “well-lighted steps were steep and exacerbated my dizziness,” said Darcey (Stinke, n. d.). Imagine the girl’s surprise when she found Karen waiting for her to help her back at the doorknob. On their way to Ireland, Karen did not utter a word about the leftovers, while Darcey was less snooty. Years passed when the girl “realized what a great gift Karen’s kindness had been” (Stinke, n. d.).
This story amazed me as it tells how the noble virtue of human kindness can heal or forgive someone’s rudeness. There was no excessive kind-heartedness, because Karen helped Darcey in hard circumstances. There is a combination of two opposites like animosity and benevolent friendliness that can be found while reading the story. Aristotle’s concept of a golden mean can be traces on the pages of Stinke’s story.
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