WHAT’S THE COST OF KINDNESS?
“What’s the cost of Kindness?”
Let me rephrase this.
What does it cost you to be kind?
If you thought about this question and decided that the answer was pretty easy, please keep reading. Several times, I’ve heard people advocate for acts of kindness by saying, “Kindness is free” or “It costs nothing to be kind”, and you may have heard these statements too. While I have also said these and agreed to them in the past, I now disagree.
Kindness is certainly a gift that everyone can afford to give, but I don’t think it’s always a costless gift. If it was, it is my firm belief that more people would be kind. After all, it costs them absolutely nothing, so what’s the real motive to do otherwise?
From experience, I’ve found that kindness isn’t always free. It often does cost you something to be kind, and maybe that’s where the beauty in it lies: Choosing to be kind regardless of the cost(s) to you.
Sometime last semester, I had just got off work, and I had about 30 minutes before the start of my next class. The building where this class was located was exactly 3 minutes away from the building I worked at. So, typically, if I was hungry after my shift ended, I would walk over to the university union (which was only 2 minutes away), get some food to eat quickly, and walk 1 minute to the building where I had my class at.
However, this day was different. I got out of the office, and I was on my way to get some food when I saw a visually impaired student that I had just attended to at work. She had a couple of items in her hands paired with the walking stick she used to feel for the ground, in order to safely get to where she needed to be. In the space of a minute, I tried to weigh the costs and benefits of offering to help her out; As funny as it may sound, I needed to decide if I wanted to get some food or go on a walk with someone I didn’t really know.
Now, the reality is that I wasn’t obligated to help out, and for all I know, she may have been perfectly fine with carrying all that stuff while trying to navigate her way on campus using her walking stick. However, I thought it would have been amazing if she just so happened to need some assistance, and I could be of help.
The first cost of choosing to help would be me not having enough time to get some food, even though I was hungry. Another potential cost would be me getting to class late since I didn’t know where exactly she was headed yet or how long the walk was going to take. The benefits, however, would be that she gets to where she’s going quicker while moving with less items, and I would be glad that I got to be of some sort of assistance.
In Economics, there’s something called the “Cost-Benefit Analysis”. Basically, if the projected benefit of doing something outweighs the cost, then you should probably do it. The benefits for me outweighed the costs at that time, so I went up to her to ask if she needed some assistance. She did, and we ended up walking to her dorm together, which happened to be not too far away from where we started walking from. Additionally, I got to my class just in time for my professor to begin the lecture. I was hungry all through the class though.
Kindness is a choice we make. It’s a beautiful trait that never goes out of style. We perform acts of kindness out of our love, care, or concern for others. Sometimes, we end up doing it at our expense. Other times, we do it out of our abundance. In either of those cases, our acts of kindness are appreciated because, regardless of what the case may be, kindness was a choice we made.
“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” –The 14th Dalai Lama.
Someone out there might be praying for it. Someone out there is entirely dependent on it. Someone out there would thank you for it. Someone out there would remember you for it.
