A work of creative nonfiction that considers the most admirable qualities that humans possess…
by: David Raney
“Human kindness is overflowing and I think it’s going to rain today.” – Randy Newman
I’m a list maker — always have been. Greatest left-handed guitarists? Jimi, Albert, Otis. Covers even better than the original? Cassandra Wilson’s “Crazy Love” (sorry, Van), Everything But the Girl’s “Tougher Than the Rest” (sorry, Bruce).
But it’s not so much about ranking these subjective things as an excuse to dive into a topic I care about. As a kid it was basketball, tennis, and radio hits. One New Year’s Eve I memorized the Top 40, which tells you something about my party potential forty years ago (and possibly today). Now it’s still music, but even more those odd, fascinating humans we share the world with.
Recently I’ve been musing on the qualities I admire in my fellow Homo sapiens, and if I had to pick three, curiosity would definitely be one. Angela Duckworth, professor and co-founder of Character Lab, describes the trait this way:
“When you’re curious about something, you process it deeply rather than superficially. You also voluntarily spend more time learning about things that spark your curiosity…. In general, people who are more curious are happier and better liked.”
There’s a reason for the happy part. Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek, says being curious “just straight up feels good” partly because it releases dopamine — the only neurotransmitter everyone has heard of — which increases pleasure and focus and “helps us find things interesting.”
My second admirable quality would probably be intelligence. Or rather, to split an important hair, I like being around people who are smart. As you well know, that’s not a synonym for how many degrees you have or your SAT scores. School smart and people smart don’t always overlap, for instance. And Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner famously listed eight kinds of intelligence, including several — intrapersonal, kinesthetic — that I’m not sure I’m smart enough to get.
“You know what I am? I’m an intellectual snob,” my friend Tom once said to me in a Richmond bar. “I just prefer being around smart people.” So do I, but for me an intellectual is someone pursuing the life of the mind professionally, or as a dedicated amateur, and while they may be smart as hell — it would certainly help — they don’t have to be. In the same way, the person who fixes my plumbing or wi-fi, or who takes my money at the counter, can of course be crazy smart. We like to think that professions and IQ (whatever that measures) line up neatly, but you don’t have to have lived very long to question that.
Ideally, smart people know they’re smart but aren’t too taken with it. (And of course they know, as do beautiful people. It’s admirable to act as if you don’t.) But insisting on it, relying on it, takes you down a different path. David Foster Wallace, in a celebrated 2005 commencement address entitled “This is Water,” put it this way: “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you’ll end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”
No, the smartest people are pretty sure they don’t know everything. Instead of static piles of information, they’re vibrating antennae for it. One of my daughter’s nicknames for me used to be SUI, Silo of Useless Information, but a gift for trivia is something I would call smart-adjacent. It’s more like a storage app, charming or irritating depending on your audience.
I prefer the smart that’s attached to curious. Don’t ask me, ask Einstein: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. Curiosity is more important than intelligence.” It’s about the desire to see behind things, either exotically foreign (Why do some cultures touch more?) or right in front of you (Why’s the sky blue again?) or small but still interesting (What makes a person left-handed?).
Think about people you know who are shrewd, good at making their way in the world, but who show barely any curiosity about any field they’re not in, or people not just like them, or books they haven’t read. Astronomy, veterinary medicine, elevator repair, stand-up comedy, scuba diving — these are things they don’t need to know about (just enough about to be dangerous, I like to say) but that others, somehow, do.
Neither curiosity nor smarts would seem to be a prerequisite for my third attribute, kindness. But think about it, kindness requires curiosity about people (especially those you don’t know), plus people smarts (empathy) and maybe other kinds as well. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois made that surprising connection in a 2023 commencement speech at Northwestern:
“I wish there was a foolproof way to spot idiots, but counterintuitively some idiots are very smart. They can dazzle you with words and misdirection. They can get promoted above you at work. The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. I’m here to tell you that when someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades. Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.”
“I am so tired of waiting,” wrote Langston Hughes, “For the world to become good and beautiful and kind.” I think we all are, but I also think it gets there more by way of little kindnesses than large. You don’t have to donate to a children’s cancer non-profit or volunteer at a soup kitchen to make a real difference, though I salute you if you do. It’s the small, incidental acts that change our default view of humans and determine how we might treat the next one that comes into view.
How often do you compliment a stranger or passerby? Hold the door at the laundromat for someone with a baby or a bag? Do you wave in people who use their turn signals, hoping they’ll wave pleasantly in return? Buy a cup for a stranger at that coffee shop you like? I confess I don’t often enough, but I want to. And it can be even smaller than that espresso. The Swedish city of Lulea began a campaign called Sag hej (“Say hello”) to ease winter blues and encourage residents to connect with each other. “One hej can change a day for somebody,” said Seyed Mohsen Hashemi, a 25-year-old student living in a nearby village.
If such vanishingly small gestures strike you as inconsequential or even silly, given the ravages of war, political divisiveness, and everyday cruelty, you’re in good company. “It is a little embarrassing,” Aldous Huxley once said, “that after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
When we do, though, people are amazed. When Rob Belcher of Massachusetts made an 86-day bike ride from Seattle to Cape Cod to raise money for pancreatic cancer research in honor of a firefighter friend who’d died of the disease, he was shocked by the acts of kindness from strangers he encountered.
“I was really surprised and just overwhelmed by people’s kindness,” he said, recalling the man who went out of his way to let him know that an upcoming route was closed off, a couple who gave him cold water on an extraordinarily hot day, and the community of people who opened their homes to him along the route, offering warm showers and meals.
Are you that guy, or the people on his path? Or maybe I’d like be to this benevolent diner named Mark:
Benton Harbor, Michigan — wait staff at the Mason Jar Cafe usually see tips ranging from 15% to 25%. Once in a while, manager Tim Sweeney said, a customer will leave a bigger one. “But not ever anything of this gratitude or magnitude.” On Monday February 4, 2024, the restaurant’s slowest day of the week, a customer named Mark left a $10,000 tip on his $32.43 bill. “Absolute disbelief to begin with,” Sweeney said. “I had a conversation with him. He wanted to proceed. [The waitress] was absolutely shocked.” The money was split nine ways among the coworkers for more than $1,100 each.
I like to think I would be him, if my lottery ticket ever comes in. It won’t, of course, so we’ll never know. But I can do smaller stuff, like hand that lotto dollar to the woman at the traffic light instead, the one holding a handwritten sign and a bucket of yellow roses, one of which I gave to my wife when my errand was over. Win-win.
Lyn Story of Fort Worth, Texas feels the same about kindness’s surprising returns. A retiree with extra time on her hands, she spends some of it giving free rides to strangers who need to get to health appointments or work. “The best way for me to feel good,” she says, “is to help other people feel good.”
She’s right, because selflessness can be selfish, as counterintuitive as that sounds. Kindness boosts our levels of dopamine (there it is again) as well as serotonin, which helps us feel satisfaction and pleasure. Research also links kind acts to reduced anxiety and depression, in both the giver and the receiver.
Are we made that way? Did evolution nudge us toward cooperation as much as tribalism, kindness as much as competition? Neil Heslop, CEO of Charities Aid Foundation, thinks so. “Generosity,” he says, “is innate to human behavior and binds us all together as a global community.” Others believe with author Bianca Sparacino that “The kindest people are not born that way, they are made.”
Religion and philosophy have been mulling that nature-nurture question for centuries, and more recently science has, too. In 2012 researchers from Harvard and Yale set out to find whether our first instinct is to act selfishly or cooperatively. The Scientific American follow-up article (spoiler alert) is titled “Scientists Probe Human Nature — and Discover We Are Good, after All.”
In the words of veteran travel writer Jan Morris — who, being both smart and curious, completes the trifecta — “Nobody is kind all the time. But every little bit helps.” Maybe we could all take that on board, for our own good and everyone else’s.
