Those who correspond with me directly may notice a few quotes beneath my contact details in my email signature. The words I took time to include there mean a great deal to me. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dorothy Day are among those represented. The quotations from their works talk about kindness, time, and being. Their words are among those by which I strive to act each day. As this New Year 2024 stretches before us, I'd like to share their words with you as I reflect on how fundamental kindness is to what we aim to achieve as nurses, scholars, and most importantly—human beings.
Emerson and Day are individuals separated by time whose words are complementary to one another in important respects. Emerson was a 19th century essayist, poet, and philosopher (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emerson/). He said, “You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” Day was a 20th century journalist and activist (https://catholicworker.org/life-and-spirituality-dorothy-day/). She wrote “We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities of faith as well—and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope our lives will mean something to people who won't be alive until centuries from now. It's a “great chain of being” … I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain, doing our best to keep that chain connected, unbroken.” I sometimes pause amid a workday just to take in the signification of Emerson's and Day's words today.
Read together, Emerson's and Day's words speak to me as a person and as a nurse. They say to me that kindness allows us to transcend the travails of daily life. That transcendence comes in remembering that, in our fleetingly short lives, other people matter most. Kindness recalls us to our precious shared humanity, despite trying circumstances. In any given moment, being kind reinforces the value of our personhood within that shared humanity. We are each individual people in our own right and universally human at the same time. Every one of us needs and craves kindness. We recoil when kindness is absent and are too often surprised when we encounter it. One of my fondest hopes is that kindness becomes so commonplace that we revel in it surrounding us instead of being surprised by it.
Kindness is many things, things that surpass our many differences. Kindness is gratitude, thanks, and simple communion with another human being. Kindness is honesty, offered with empathy and consideration for the other. My experience shows me that kindness commonly means most in small gestures. The pace of our lives as people, professionals, and scholars typically presses us to forgo the small gesture. Think of how often you leave an encounter without ever hearing “how are you?” or receive email messages devoid of a salutation, a farewell, or both. Conversely, consider the last time a genuine co
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