The Kindness of Being Seen

I came across a fragment of a Wordsworth poem and began to wonder what sorts of kindness have shaped who I have become. Wordsworth was reflecting on a particular landscape and how it stayed with him even when he was away. In the middle of the poem are these lines:

“His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.”

The poem isn't really about the kindness of other people. Wordsworth seems to be wondering about what we take so deeply into ourselves, whether beauty, landscape, or experience, and how it continues to influence the kind of person we become.

Meanwhile, I've been working on the virtue of kindness for The Virtue Post, and his words sent me in a slightly different direction. I began wondering: What kindnesses have I received that the giver may barely remember, but that I still carry with me? I came across a story about a woman who stopped after seeing another woman on the side of the road after an accident. She brought her a cup of her own tea, handed it to her, and then got back in her car and went on her way. The woman who received it didn't even like tea, but she drank the whole cup. She kept the tea bag for fifteen years. I love that detail. Whatever the woman who stopped thought she was doing that day, it was probably not very much. She acted spontaneously, offering the only thing she had in the moment of her noticing. The person receiving her kindness experienced something worth holding onto for fifteen years.

I don't always remember what someone actually said or exactly what happened. My memory is more sensory, maybe. I tend to remember the feeling of an experience, what it was like to be with someone, or the way something shifted inside me. When I began looking for the kindnesses I have carried with me, what came back weren't necessarily favors or good deeds. They were people.

I think growing up without my mother left me parched for recognition. And the kindnesses I remember most came from friends who seemed to really see me, or who gave me an experience of myself I had not considered before.

I think of my first semester at university. Mind you, this was after spending far too long at community college. I had finally transferred into the teaching program and would attend all of my classes with the same cohort of about twenty men and women for the next three years. That is where I met a woman who would become my friend. From the outside, what she offered might have looked like friendliness. But she saw something in me that I couldn't quite see yet, and she continually invited me out of hiding.

I was a young woman who didn't really trust women. Her continual trust in me and her openness warmed me and allowed me, slowly, to drop my defenses. I don't know if she knows any of this. I don't know if anything she did was conscious or if she would even remember it as particularly significant. But her friendship was such a kindness to me that, maybe for the first time, I began to become more open with women. I began to trust them. I even started to own my own worth a little. We grew apart after that time, but something of what she gave me stayed.

Years later, another friend offered me a different kind of recognition. I was a participant in her nature immersion program for women for self-reflection and growth. She's an old soul deeply connected to the earth. At one point she looked at me, deeply and directly into my eyes, as we stood heart to heart, and spoke about the depth she saw in me. It was an intimate kind of I see you. And I felt relief. Her recognition somehow made it okay to be different. Okay that I don't care much for superficiality. Okay that I have a deep inner life that very few people know about. Okay to be unusual and a little mysterious. She hadn't given me any of those qualities. She had simply recognized something that was already there.

And the recognition was a kindness. There was love in her sharing it.

I don't think I knew until then how much I ached to be known and seen in a way that validated who I was. My mother had no ability for the kind of deep intimacy and connection I craved, and perhaps I learned to close off that part of myself before I even understood what I was doing. My friend's kind and loving act of noticing allowed something in me to soften. I could relax a little more into who I already was.

More recently, my new sister-in-law has been teaching me something much simpler about kindness. She is open and generous with kind words. She notices things and says them. It sounds so small. But being around her has made me realize how little it costs to tell someone the good thing you noticed about them. I noticed that cool thing you did. Or you look beautiful today. Or you're really good at that. She makes people's hearts a little lighter and freer.

Her example asks something of me, because I have been guarded for much of my life. Judgment became a habit. Perhaps judgment is another kind of defense: if I am standing back evaluating, I don't have to risk quite as much. But judgment is costly. It keeps people out and makes the world feel harsher. Kindness asks me to do something different with what I notice. Kindness can open us to the connection we may have been guarding ourselves against.

I wonder, too, if this is part of the difference between judgment and kindness. Judgment seems to involve the mind standing back, assessing and deciding. Kindness often seems more immediate. The heart notices and responds before the mind has had time to deliberate. The woman brings the tea. A friend offers trust. Someone says the kind thing that occurs to her rather than keeping it to herself. Maybe kindness is not always something we decide to do. Sometimes it is what happens when we are open enough to another person to respond.

Maybe this is why, when I went looking through my own life for kindness, I kept finding some version of the same thing. Noticing. Seeing. Recognition.

There is a strange contradiction in wanting to hide and wanting desperately to be seen. Perhaps what we fear isn't really being seen at all. Maybe we fear being looked at and misunderstood. Being recognized is different. Someone sees something true in us, something that may not be obvious from the outside, and meets it warmly. There is relief in that.

And perhaps there is something formative in it too. My college friend treated me as though I were worth knowing before I entirely believed it myself. Years later, a friend named something in me that I hadn't quite given myself permission to inhabit. My sister-in-law keeps showing me, in ordinary ways, that noticing something good and saying it aloud makes the world a little warmer. None of these women set out to teach me about kindness. They simply offered it.

Maybe that is why Wordsworth's “little, nameless, unremembered acts” stayed with me even though his poem was really about the impression the natural world leaves upon us. The kindnesses that shape us aren't always grand enough to have names. The giver may not remember them. Sometimes even the receiver remembers only how they felt. But something gets through.

I wonder if kindness begins there, in noticing. In getting outside of our own heads long enough to really see another person. And when the seeing comes from the heart, perhaps the response doesn't require very much thought. We say the thing. We bring the tea. We invite someone out of hiding. It can be spontaneous, fleeting, perhaps even forgotten. And still, it stays.