The Deep Roots of Kindness

Exploring Life through the Written Word

Dear friends,

The first cool morning arrived a couple of weeks ago like a promise. I stepped outside and breathed in that familiar September air—crisp, carrying hints of woodsmoke and dying leaves—and felt something in my chest unclench. Autumn was coming. For a few days, the temperatures dropped into the seventies, the humidity lifted, and I found myself planning sweater weather and thinking about the harvest moon. Then the heat returned with a vengeance, pushing us back into the nineties, and I realized I'd been fooled by nature's dress rehearsal.

But those few days reminded me why autumn holds such power over my imagination. It's more than the colors painting the hillsides or the satisfying crunch of leaves underfoot. There's something about this season that invites reflection, that pulls me toward deeper currents of thought about what matters most. Maybe it's the harvest—witnessing the practical culmination of months of patient work in the fields. Maybe it's the way the light changes, slanting lower and casting longer shadows that seem to illuminate the landscape and the contours of my life.

This particular autumn finds me wrestling with a question that's been following me through conversations with friends, through books I've been reading, through the quiet moments when I'm working in my garden with my hands in the soil. It's a question that seems simple on the surface but grows more complex the deeper you dig: Why is kindness so hard?

I know what you might be thinking. Kindness isn't hard. We tell children to be kind. We value kindness in our friends and partners. We admire kind acts when we witness them. But if kindness came naturally, if it were as effortless as we pretend, would we need to work so hard to cultivate it? Would every major religion and moral philosophy throughout human history need to explicitly teach it as a fundamental principle?

Recently, I had a conversation with my friend A. Jay Adler about this very question. Jay and I share a deep belief in treating others with respect and dignity. We found ourselves lamenting what feels like a cultural shift away from basic kindness—not just in public discourse, but in the everyday interactions that shape our communities. Around the same time, I read an essay by another friend, Kert Lenseigne 🌱, that reinforced this sense that something essential is being lost in how we relate to one another.

The timing of these conversations wasn't coincidental. They've been happening against the backdrop of my seasonal ritual of putting the garden to bed for winter. This past week, I've been cleaning up the raised beds, pulling weeds from the flower beds in front of our house, and preparing everything for the dormant months ahead. It's methodical work that gives my mind space to wander, and as I worked, I kept returning to this question of kindness.

That's when I noticed something that stopped me cold.

The Architecture of Our Better Angels

Some of the biggest, ugliest weeds in my flower beds came up easily. They looked terrible—sprawling, aggressive, choking out the plants I actually wanted to grow—but when I grabbed them and pulled, they surrendered with barely a fight. Their root systems were surprisingly shallow, more show than substance. A few tugs and they were gone, leaving behind neat holes in the soil that I could fill with my hands.

But scattered throughout the beds were smaller weeds that I almost overlooked. They seemed insignificant, barely noticeable among the larger plants. When I finally got around to addressing them, though, I discovered something unsettling. These unassuming little invaders had been busy below ground, sending down complex root systems that seemed to touch every corner of the soil. Removing them required tools, patience, and the acceptance that I probably wouldn't get every piece. Some of those roots would remain, ready to send up new growth when conditions were right.

Standing there with dirt under my fingernails and a pile of deceptive weeds at my feet, I realized I was looking at a perfect metaphor for the work of becoming more kind.

The big, obvious failures of kindness are like those showy weeds. When I am openly cruel, disrespectful, or dismissive of others, I can see the damage immediately. Society generally doesn't tolerate outright cruelty, so I learn to recognize these behaviors and uproot them. I apologize when I snap at someone in traffic. I feel genuine remorse when I realize I've hurt a friend's feelings. I work on managing my temper and controlling my tongue. This is important work, and I should feel good about doing it.

But what about the smaller, less obvious obstacles to kindness? What about the quiet assumptions I make about people who look different, vote differently, or live differently than I do? What about the subtle ways I distance myself from others' struggles because engaging would require something from me I’m not sure I want to give? These are the deep-rooted weeds of the heart, and they're much harder to address because they're much harder to see.

Trying to understand what makes some people naturally kind while others struggle with basic empathy has taught me this: genuine kindness isn't just about managing my behavior. It's about examining the soil of my beliefs about other people.

The Golden Standard

When Jesus told his followers to "love your neighbor as yourself," he wasn't suggesting a nice addition to an already complete moral framework. He was identifying the foundation upon which all other ethical behavior rests. The Golden Rule appears in virtually every major religious and philosophical tradition precisely because it captures something essential about what it means to live well with others.

But here's what I've come to understand about that deceptively simple instruction: it assumes I actually love myself in a healthy way. It assumes I believe in my own inherent worth, not because of what I've accomplished or how I've performed, but simply because I exist. And it asks me to extend that same fundamental recognition to everyone else I encounter.

This is where kindness gets complicated.

If I struggle to see value in myself—if my sense of worth depends on being better than, smarter than, more successful than others—then treating my neighbors as I treat myself becomes a competitive rather than a generous act. I can't give what I don't possess. I can't extend grace to others if I’m withholding it from myself.

I think this explains why kindness often feels forced or artificial when I try to practice it as pure behavior modification. I focus on saying the right words and doing the right actions while ignoring the deeper question of whether I actually believe other people deserve my kindness. I uproot the surface weeds while leaving the root systems intact.

The literature I return to when I need reminding of what authentic kindness looks like almost always features characters who have somehow made peace with their humanity. They're not perfect—often they're deeply flawed—but they've stopped using their imperfections as weapons against themselves or others. This internal work creates space for the kind of generous attention to others that I recognize as genuine kindness.

Carl Jung

Stories That Show the Way

Two books have shaped my understanding of kindness more than any philosophical treatise or moral instruction manual. The first is Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree," and the second is E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web." Both are written for children, but both contain wisdom that most adults spend lifetimes trying to fully comprehend.

"The Giving Tree" presents us with a relationship that pushes the boundaries of what we might call healthy kindness. The tree gives everything—her apples, her branches, her trunk—to the boy she loves, asking for nothing in return. Some readers find this troubling, seeing it as a model of codependence rather than genuine generosity. But I think they're missing Silverstein's deeper point.

The tree gives not because she has to, not because she expects something back, but because giving is her nature. Her kindness flows from abundance, not scarcity. She finds joy in the boy's joy, even when his requests become increasingly demanding. The story becomes troubling only when we try to apply its logic to human relationships without recognizing that the tree represents something larger than individual psychology—she represents the kind of love that exists beyond transaction, beyond expectation, beyond the careful calculations that govern so much of our human interaction.

"Charlotte's Web" offers a more realistic model of kindness between equals. Charlotte saves Wilbur's life through her intelligence and creativity, but she does so knowing she'll receive nothing material in return. Her kindness emerges from recognition—she sees something valuable in Wilbur that others have missed. When the other animals dismiss him as "just a pig," Charlotte looks deeper and finds a friend worth saving.

Charlotte's kindness naturally flows from her way of seeing. She doesn't have to work to be kind to Wilbur; her kindness is simply the expression of her recognition of his worth. The effort she expends is in the execution—weaving words into her web, finding the right messages to convince the humans—but the impulse itself is effortless because it's rooted in genuine affection and respect.

Both stories suggest that authentic kindness isn't primarily about action—it's about vision. It's about developing eyes to see value where others see only ordinariness or inconvenience.

The Practice of Seeing

This brings me back to my garden and the lesson of the deep-rooted weeds. If I want to cultivate genuine kindness, I have to be willing to do the slower, less visible work of examining my assumptions about other people.

I live in a politically divided country. There are people whose votes, beliefs, and lifestyle choices often differ dramatically from my own. Some support candidates I can't imagine voting for. Some hold religious beliefs I don't share. Some have made life choices that seem, from my perspective, to be mistakes.

The shallow-rooted response is to simply avoid being openly hostile. I can be polite in passing, keep my political opinion to myself, and maintain the basic civility that allows a community to function. This isn't nothing—basic civility matters—but it's not the same thing as kindness.

Kindness requires me to dig deeper, to examine the assumptions I make about people based on their political yard signs or their church attendance or their choice to homeschool their children or send their kids to private school. It asks me to consider the possibility that their different choices might flow from different circumstances, different experiences, different information—not necessarily from different values.

This doesn't mean I have to agree with everyone or pretend that all choices are equally good. It means I have to resist the urge to write people off, to dismiss their complexity, to assume I understand their motivations without actually listening to their stories.

Last year, I had a conversation with a neighbor whose political views differ significantly from mine. We talked about our kids, our hopes for the future, and our frustrations with feeling like the world is changing faster than we can adapt to it.

By the end of that conversation, I realized that underneath our different political conclusions, we shared remarkably similar concerns. We both wanted safe neighborhoods for our families. We both worried about economic uncertainty. We both felt like traditional sources of authority and information were becoming less reliable. Our different votes reflected different theories about how to address these shared concerns, not fundamentally different values.

That conversation didn't change my political beliefs, and I doubt it changed his. But it did change how I see him when I pass his house and how I think about his family. The deep roots of judgment and assumption loosened just a bit, creating space for something closer to genuine regard.

The Generosity of Attention

Here's what I've learned about the practice of kindness over two decades of conscious effort: it's less about grand gestures and more about the quality of attention I bring to ordinary moments.

Kindness is remembering that the cashier who seems distracted might be working a second job to pay for her daughter's medical bills. It's considering that the aggressive driver who cut me off might be rushing to the hospital, not just being selfish. It's recognizing that the coworker who's been difficult in meetings might be going through a divorce, not just trying to make my life harder.

None of these alternative explanations excuse genuinely harmful behavior, but they create space for understanding rather than judgment as my default response. They remind me that everyone I encounter is fighting battles I know nothing about, carrying burdens I can't see, trying to make sense of circumstances that might overwhelm me if I faced them myself.

This kind of attention doesn't come naturally to me. I’m wired to make quick judgments about other people—it's a survival mechanism that helped our ancestors navigate complex social situations with limited information. But in our current context, where I interact with hundreds of people I don't really know, this tendency toward rapid categorization often works against kindness rather than supporting it.

The antidote is what I've come to think of as generous attention—the practice of granting others the benefit of the doubt I hope they'll grant me, of assuming complexity rather than simplicity, of remaining curious about people's stories rather than jumping to conclusions about their character.

This isn't naive optimism. Some people really are selfish, cruel, or dangerous, and discernment is an important aspect of wisdom. But most of the people I encounter are neither saints nor villains—they're fellow travelers doing their best with the resources they have, making mistakes, learning as they go, deserving the same patience I hope to receive when I fall short of my ideals.

The Long Harvest

As autumn deepens I think about the work I've done in my garden this season. Some of it shows immediate results—the beds look cleaner, the remaining plants have more space to breathe, and the overall appearance is more orderly. But the most important work I've done is invisible. By addressing those deep-rooted weeds now, I'm creating conditions for healthier growth next spring.

Kindness works the same way. The external behaviors matter—the patience I show to difficult people, the generosity I extend to those who can't reciprocate, the civility I maintain even when we disagree. But the work that makes these behaviors sustainable happens below the surface, in the slow cultivation of beliefs about human worth and dignity that make kindness feel natural rather than forced.

I think about the people in my life who seem effortlessly kind—friends whose first instinct is empathy rather than judgment, neighbors who consistently show up for others without keeping score, acquaintances who somehow make everyone around them feel more valued. What they have in common isn't perfect behavior or unlimited emotional resources. What they share is a fundamental belief in the worthiness of human beings, including themselves.

They've done the deep work of uprooting the assumptions that make kindness conditional—the belief that people have to earn our respect, that differences in opinion reflect differences in character, that scarcity of kindness makes it more valuable. They've cultivated the kind of inner abundance that allows generosity to flow naturally, the way water flows downhill.

This doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen without conscious effort. Like tending a garden, cultivating kindness requires regular attention, seasonal assessment, and the willingness to keep working even when the results aren't immediately visible.

But also like gardening, this work offers its own rewards. There's something deeply satisfying about creating conditions where good things can grow, about contributing to the beauty and health of the larger ecosystem we all share. There's joy in witnessing the flourishing that becomes possible when people feel truly seen and valued.

The Autumn of Kindness

As I write this, the leaves are just beginning to turn. The trees in the neighborhood are showing hints of yellow at their edges, and the oak trees have started dropping their first acorns. Soon the whole landscape will be transformed into the glorious display that makes autumn my favorite season.

But I know that this transformation doesn't happen all at once. It's the result of months of quiet preparation, of trees gradually withdrawing nutrients from their leaves, of complex chemical processes that began long before the first cool night signaled summer's end. The beauty we see in October is the culmination of invisible work that's been happening all season long.

I think human kindness works the same way. The moments when I witness or experience genuine kindness—the stranger who helps with a flat tire, the neighbor who brings soup when I’m sick, the friend who listens without judgment when I’m struggling—these visible acts are supported by months or years of invisible inner work.

They're the fruit of someone's decision to keep believing in human goodness despite evidence to the contrary, to keep practicing empathy even when it's not reciprocated, to keep pulling up the deep-rooted weeds of cynicism and judgment that choke out our capacity for generous love.

This gives me hope, even in seasons when kindness feels scarce. Just as the trees are already preparing for next spring's growth even as they prepare for winter's dormancy, people everywhere are doing the quiet work of cultivating kindness in their hearts, creating conditions for the kind of human flourishing we all need.

My friend Jay and I may lament the current state of public discourse, and my friend Kert may worry about our collective capacity for compassion, but I believe we're also part of a larger community of people who are committed to this deeper work. We're not just managing our behavior—we're tending the soil of our souls, creating space for the kind of love that transforms not just individual relationships but entire communities.

The harvest of this work may not be visible until next spring, or the spring after that. But autumn teaches us patience, reminds us that the most important growth often happens out of sight, in the dark quiet of winter, preparing for the abundance that's always just around the corner.

As the days grow shorter and the air grows crisp, I'm grateful for this season of reflection, for the chance to examine the roots of my own capacity for kindness, for the reminder that small acts of attention and care can create ripple effects we may never fully see. In a world that often feels fractured and harsh, choosing kindness is both a radical act of hope and the most natural thing we can do.

The deep roots take time to establish, but once they're strong, they support the kind of growth that can weather any storm.

Want to read more about kindness? Check out Kert’s article below.

Saturday On My Couch With George

Also, go and subscribe to Barrie and JoJo at Feasts and Fables. Be Kind is an integral part of their Encouragement Manifesto.

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