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January 02 Article



Senses Combined With Judgment Promotes Unkindness
By W. Owen Thornton

Eyes and ears can betray us when it comes to kindness.  Before our brains are engaged, a look or something you hear can dictate the course of a relationship in a negative direction.  It’s scary to think that an instant reaction or a moment can make us unkind … but it can.

There’s a young woman at my university who is blind and simultaneously kind.  She enters the cafeteria and walks up to a table that has only one person seated at it and she introduces herself and asks to sit down.  Traci, I’ll call her, is a delightful young woman.  She speaks a little too loudly and her introductory conversations are a bit stilted, but her heart is pure and her motives kind.  She just wants to sit and talk with someone while she eats dinner.  To her, each stranger she sits with is a new friend she hasn’t yet met.

I admire Traci.  She’s bold and unafraid.  Everyone else in the cafeteria sits in their silos of isolation and she does the right thing by reaching out and shaking someone’s hand and introducing herself.  Personally, I think everyone should be more like her.  I should be more like her.  And if a person doesn’t want to be interrupted they should feel free to politely say so, and Traci, or anyone doing the introducing shouldn’t feel hurt by that response … they should move on and introduce themselves to someone who doesn’t mind talking for a spell.

Anyway, if Traci is kind and bold and unafraid, it is also a good thing she is blind.  Her unorthodox behaviour creates a great deal of eye-rolling.  I once watched as she sat with one young woman.  I was nearby and because she talks a little overloud, I could hear much of their exchange.  In fact, it was hard to ignore it.  The woman Traci sat with excused herself as soon as she was done eating.  Did this unhinge Traci?  Not in the slightest.  She turned around and introduced herself to the next table of four boys.

Now because people aren’t used to strangers walking up to them and introducing themselves these boys did something quite natural, and well … something that is a little unkind.  They rolled their eyes and arched their brows as if to say, “Who is this person?”  I’m afraid that if Traci could see, she would kindly introduce herself to someone once and she would see their reaction and she would retreat into herself never to do something like that again.

Isn’t that an odd thing to think about?  Here she is, simply being a kind, gracious young woman and really, I think the rest of us ‘normal’ people would shut her down and make her feel like a weird oddity.  And that’s just not right, is it?  It certainly isn’t kind.  But there are unwritten rules in our society and one of them is, you don’t walk up to a gaggle of strangers in a cafeteria and introduce yourself.  In some situations, like a business networking organization, that gift of self-introduction would be a plus, but here … in a cafeteria … it’s judged to be wrong.  Aren’t we a strange species?  How is it that we can make someone feel stupid for doing something kind with simply a raised brow … but we do.  Me?  I’m going to act more like Traci more of the time … and I’m going to do my best to let go of the hurt when I see those eye-rolls and raised brows.  If they think I’m odd because I introduce myself in order to meet someone new, that’s their problem.

Now, across town, on another day … one that wasn’t going so well for me … I had another sense betray me … and mixed with my own judgmental capacity, I really read a situation badly which led me to being or at least thinking unkind thoughts.  Maybe I had a bit of an excuse because I was sitting in an auto body shop waited to be picked up by the car rental company.  Everyone is okay, by the way, but the car … well … I was sitting in an auto body shop!  Anywho, I’m waiting and this elderly lady came inside and told her story.  She’d clipped one of her mirrors but otherwise the car was drivable.  Seeing as it was four days before Christmas, she was hoping to report the incident, but to have her car repaired after Christmas.

The servicing attendant said that this would be fine.  I’m sure they didn’t have any time to fix the car before Christmas anyway, so it would just be in a line-up somewhere waiting to be fixed over the holidays.  So the lady might as well keep her car for a few days and have it so she could drive to family or whatever.  The employee of the shop said that he would grab his camera, and get the information from her, and that after taking pictures of the car it would be about 10 minutes and she could be on her way.

She seemed to misunderstand all this and repeated that she didn’t want her car in the shop over the holidays.  The man repeated what he’d said, that after pictures and gathering basic info she could be on her way in about 10 minutes.  This exchange of ‘non-listening’ went back and forth a couple of more times.  To his credit, the employee of the shop never lost his cool.  But … I did!  I didn’t say anything.  It wasn’t my place.  But I went inside my head and thought, “This lady is really thick!”

The exchange had been clear and she simply could not understand what was going on and I couldn’t imagine why she was acting so oddly.  And then it happened.  I was corrected and found to be more than a wee bit unkind.  She said, “I’m sorry.  I can’t hear you.  I’m a wee bit deaf.”

Didn’t I feel gormless?  And here I am attempting to blog a human kindness website and I jumped to an unkind conclusion!  I know.  I know.  Many people would, but I disappointed myself.  And what was interesting was that the man working there, who had repeated himself three times, had done so each time without malice or an attitude behind his voice.  He had simply done the perfect thing and had coolly and professionally said the same thing each time.  His technique – that of repeating himself with an even tone – is called the ‘broken record’ technique.  He knows, as I surely did not fathom at the time, that people in her situation don’t always get what someone is saying because their internal focus is way off because they’re too busy worrying about the damage done to their vehicles.  (Maybe I can use this as a bit of excuse for myself, but the truth of the matter is, I’ve had these kinds of thoughts in other situations where I wasn’t in distress … so I don’t think I can let myself off the hook that easily!)

To be fair to the woman, the man was talking to her while looking around for the digital camera and I have found that when talking with deaf people that face-to-face contact remarkably improves the communication: they see your lips form the words and they can read your expression simultaneously and these things both aid in their understanding of the words they may not be hearing clearly.  So that’s a point for us all to grow on too!  The employee should have done one thing at a time: speak to the woman directly, and then look for the camera after the communication was completed.  Place your focus on people because that always makes any communication situation better.

But still, I had gone inside my head and made a judgment about this poor soul who only wanted some help with her car.  How many of us are guilty of making those snap judgments?  How many of us have had them made against us, when all we really required was a wee bit of patience and understanding?  How much better would the world be if we all paid attention to one another a little more and offered each other a wee bit more slack than we do.  It’s about being kind, folks, and making snap judgments against one another flies in the opposite direction.  This quick judgment thing seems to be the norm rather than the usual way of treating one another.

When you look at things there could be a million reasons why someone doesn’t get a simple message beyond being hearing impaired: language barriers, accents, other sounds drowning out the words, and having the mind engaged internally rather than focused on the external communication.  And how many times do we make an incorrect snap judgment against someone because we see no reason to explain their behaviour when there might be a million reasons which do explain it.

Human Kindness lies in being someone perpetually aware of the uniqueness of the world and all its situations and waiting for the bigger picture to unfold before we make unkind snap judgments.  For those of us who think people should react as we do … and I dare say most of us get caught up in this unkind game … we need to step back from the edge of our own perfection and see that the world doesn’t always operate from our perspective.  It operates from approximately six billion different ones, each with a legitimate reason for acting and behaving the way they do.  So when something is going south, like this situation, I could have become actively kind and stepped in and offered to help the lady communicate, or at the least I could have stepped back from my own judgment of her, and that too would have left a place for more kindness … even if I didn’t actively DO anything.

In telling you these two stories, I simply desire to share with you how easy it can be to be ‘human’ and to react in such a way as to be unkind.  The people raising their brows when Traci extends the hand of fellowship do themselves an unkindness … placing barriers between themselves and a potentially new best friend.  And they could hurt Traci if she could see their reaction.  And when we are quick to judge others for their odd behaviour as I did in regards to the woman in the auto body shop, I did myself and the world an unkindness.  It wasn’t a big deal, but it taught me something about myself.  Maybe the key to this story is the following.  We’re never going to be perfect at anything including human kindness.  But if we open our minds to the ideas of kindness, at least when something like these situations happen, we’re open and receptive to the message that we should be listening too … like cutting people some slack when they don’t behave in a prescribed way according to societal norms.  We all do odd things and we all make mistakes.  The question is do we want to be around people who will point these things out to us and make us feel like fools, or do we want to be around gracious people who cut us some slack and who make us feel like special individuals … even when our behaviour does seem odd.  I’d rather live in the latter world, and I’m betting most of us would.

So, it’s a new year.  You have the power to bring more kindness into your personal radar.  Why not adopt this new vision and … just remember to be kinder to both yourself and everyone else out there.  Together, we just might make the world a magical place to exist!