Kindness has been one of my core values for quite a while. It means to me affection, warmth, gentleness, care and concern for others. I love to be an object of others expressing kindness towards me and I like the idea of being kind to others. I believe I am. Lately, I included myself into the “others” and try to be kind towards myself as well. Not so simple for me.
So when I saw the book by Adam Phillips, On Kindness, I thought that I would like to have it. It indeed started with just having it, but not reading it for a long time. The book landed up on my table together with two other unread books by the author – Missing Out and Unforbidden Pleasures. I became aware of Adam Phillips reading one of Ramana’s posts where he writes about the book Missing Out. The post starts with a long excerpt from the book. It caught my attention and woke up a desire to examine not only the book by my life as well. I bought the book, started to read and then realized that it requires being studied and not just read. I put it away. I just realized that the whole year has passed and I only have skimmed the book. I intended to read/study it and when, on two other occasions, I saw his other books in shops, I bought them. They have been waiting till the last week when I eventually read On Kindness. Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst. His writing is elegant and vocabulary impressive. I like it. He writes about things that one needs to ponder on and reflect while reading. It is a “deep and meaningful” kind of a book. I like it even if for a while it confused me and even put me off kindness.
The book covers a short history of kindness and arguments against practicing it, its negative points and even its harmful nature. After some thoughts provoking arguments which are designed to be provocative, he re-defines kindness to be “the strongest indicator of people’s well-being, their pleasure of existence”. He says that when we experience love for life, we want to extend to others our being and our enjoyment. He calls it “authentic kindness”. It includes seeing people as they are and not as we would like them to be. We often put people on pedestals and then expect them to live up to our desires and expectations. I have been guilty of that many times in my past. (Oh, oh! sorry friends J) Authentic kindness requires that we see people as they are, with warts and all and still accept them and maybe even love them. We can do it only when we have acceptance of our imperfect selves. Only then we can be authentically kind.
The opposite to “authentic kindness” is “magic kindness”. Adam Phillips gives an example of a child who is dependant on his parents and as a consequence needs to be lovable enough for them to look after him. Kindness and sweetness are magic and an insurance policy of a dependent child. The child also wants to protect his parents from getting harmed or unhappy so they can continue to meet his needs. This is a manipulation, and it has to be romanticized to be palatable. These arguments made me think that I should be off kindness and fast.
Another point that shook me up was that “too much kindness is a saboteur of development, of fully formed independence”. I have recently seen an example of a grown up woman who dedicates her life to her mother. She does not work; she is not in a relationship. She lives to support her mother. This is an example of a “magic kindness”. She has not grown up yet and still needs her mother to fulfill her emotional needs; she has not been able to separate from her mother. For many years I felt guilty that I left my parents and moved far away leaving them without my practical support. It was a kind of absolution to read that “it is only if the parents consent to be treated callously, that is without concern for their own needs, that the child can be the entrepreneur of her own growth”. My parents gave me their consent and, yes, my actions were callous. It is clearer now that this was as it was supposed to be and that there is no need to feel guilty. I still wish I could have comforted them in difficult times, but I understand that this kindness would have stopped me to live as I thought best for my development and identity. This is the brutality of and the authentic kindness, but it is the kindness I am ready to embrase.
