What is the nature of kindness? What does it mean to be kind? So often we discuss kindness in the immediate sense, doing this thing or that, but stepping back, there is evidence that a lifetime of general kindness is greater than the sum of individual kindnesses. I think of Mary Oliver's beloved verse "Watch how I start each day in Kindness" and emergency nurse Christie Watson's memoir of the kindnesses that not only comforted her patients but also lent her and her colleagues a feeling of togetherness in an otherwise high-conflict career. 

What do we get when we are kind, and what does that add up to? In other words, what is the long view on kindness?

Congratulations, by the Way, is a simple read with a hefty message. It is the transcript of a Commencement Speech delivered by writer George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) delivered in 2013 to the graduating class of Syracuse University. But more deeply, it is a personal tale of the relationship between kindness and legacy. Not legacy to others, but to ourselves.

In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentially, her Convocation Speech name will be 'Ellen.' Ellen was small, shy... When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.

The older we grow, the more we realize life doesn't sort itself evenly among the lines between those who are kind and those who are not. It comprises a thousand, a million points of opportunity to be kind or mean or silent, and it is made up of us, individuals with free will and vulnerable hearts. And just like actions of love forge our human connection, so do human errors and their scar tissue.

"Billions of faces on the earth’s surface..." writes Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. Human reflections in the dome of the British Museum.

Saunders's anecdote gives the narrative its dimension.

So she came to our school and neighbourhood and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased. ('Your hair taste good?" - That sort of thing.) I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she'd look after such an insult... At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know, "How was your day, sweetie?" and she'd say "Oh, fine."

Such things have been said before by many. The power of this speech is that, in simple presentation, it leaves room for our minds to make of it what we will. I returned to my past. I've been that "Ellen." I've also witnessed such an "Ellen."

"All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unalike," wrote Maya Angelou. Spreading "ripples of kindness" throughout England, the Take Heart organization crochets pocket-sized hearts with notes saying, "You are not alone." Learn more.

Saunders continues:

Sometimes I'd see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it. And then—they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing. One day she was there, next day she wasn't. End of story.

We know what comes next, but we need Saunders to say it. "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness."

If George Saunders didn't exist, I wonder if we could have invented him. He was born in Texas (he often pushes an invisible frontier), grew up in Chicago (he has that Midwest humility), and worked early in life in geophysics on oil fields (the bizarre intersection of pre-historic materials and wild frontiers).

There is something other-century about Saunders. His first novel and 2017 Booker Prize–winning Lincoln in the Bardo, is wholly original. The "Bardo" is a term from Tibetan Buddhism that is the metaphysical state of being after the body has died but before it has been reborn in another form. The bardo existence can be brief or an eternity, immeasurable on a human scale. As Saunders demonstrates fictionally, it is a time when our small acts of being human enact drama before our watchful consciousness, like figures from the theatre. 

Saunders' speech at Syracuse, where he earned an MFA and still teaches creative writing there, was to his young self, or at the very least to a character of self-wandering the bardo as if he sat in the very chairs he addresses. He does not plead nor preach. He states calmly:

It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

 George Saunders.

Saunders isn't dealing with regrets, however. He's talking about legacy. What kind of impact do we want to make on the world? What shall people say of us when we're gone? And most importantly, as we stand to face ourselves, what measure will we take?

Look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life do you remember most fondly with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

We underestimate how deeply we affect each other—this human continuum enabled by our emotional intelligence and pedestalled 2,000 years ago by Marcus Aurelius, reiterated by Emerson, and embraced by Mary Oliver, and practiced by each of us in ways we fail to realize.

"Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid? asks Charlie Mackesy in the soul-healing book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

It was with kindness that Rainer Maria Rilke responded to a young poet seeking his help; kindness that compelled Anna Deavere Smith to dig into her heart and vulnerabilities in Letters to a Young Artist, and kindness that opened the arms of the Provençal to Peter Mayle when he relocated to the South of France to start anew.

Kindness might not be all we have, but it will be what we remember.