"For Kindness Begins Where Necessity Ends"

That quote stood out, for me anyway, from the thousands of words and word combinations in a 571-page novel, "The Lincoln Highway".

Sally, one of the characters in the book, a most adorable, virtuous and no-nonsense young lady uttered those words, as she lamented about one facet of human nature or certain habits or behavior of those she encountered in her young life.

One is most prevailed upon, as I was when I read that quote, to ask what it meant. First, I wondered why the author wrote that sentence,  which made up the entire last paragraph by itself, at the end of a chapter on page 104.  

The best selling author, Amor Towles, also wrote another best seller, "A Gentleman in Moscow". In "The Lincoln Highway", he employed a storytelling technique that involves multiple points of view; that is, the entire book is woven seamlessly from the perspective of all the different characters, sometimes in the first person and at other times it is done in the third person. From chapter to chapter, a character is the story teller or the story is told from the perspective of the character when he or she is the focus of the chapter. The characters emerge in and out, as the chapters unfold with the developing story.

When it was Sally's turn it was in the first person, so we, the readers, get to know what Sally felt and thought.  And, it was she who said those words. Having lost her mom at a young age, and a married sister who moved out of state, she takes care of all the household chores  in the home she shares with her dad, who works the farm and ranch.  Though not the main character in the story, Sally has the maturity and clear thinking of an intelligent, yet practical young woman.

Her piety begins with what is clearly a good working Biblical knowledge mixed with a pragmatic view of the world.  In her mind, it is not kindness when one does what is necessary.  Here is a quote:

"And I do it because it's unnecessary.

For what is kindness but the performance that is beneficial to another and unrequired?  There is no kindness in paying a bill. There is no kindness in getting up at dawn to slop the pigs, or milk the cows, or gather the eggs from the henhouse.  For that matter, there is no kindness in making dinner, or in cleaning the kitchen after your father heads upstairs without so much as a word of thanks.

Nope, I said to myself while climbing into bed and switching the light, there is no kindness in any of that.

For kindness begins where necessity ends".   (The chapter ends with that).

In Sally's mind, she considers kindness as doing something good to someone or others even when it is not required. More so when it is neither necessary nor expected. 

If we go by that, it is kindness when one adds to his or her tab after a meal at the restaurant a 20% up to 30% tip to the server if the conventional rule says 10-15% is all that is necessary.  When upon seeing a delivery truck about to stop by the front of one's home, one hurries to the refrigerator to get a bottled water and hands it over to the delivery person or postal worker in exchange for the package, because it was such a sweltering summer day, one dose of kindness was just dispensed.  Even if the dose of kindness was never completed because the delivery person was in such haste, perhaps because he or she was running behind, preoccupied with the prospect of not making his or her delivery quota for the day, so that by the time one opened the door, the truck had already lurched away to the next stop, the intent to offer the bottled water was kindness just the same. 

Now, we all know that kindness is never always about money; in fact, hardly is it ever about money.  And, though it is returned, it never is owed. Think about that for a minute. 

Hardly will kindness be explained by science. It will, however, defy it.  Take Isaac Newton's third law of motion, also known as the law of action and reaction, which states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Where kindness "defies that law" is that a single dose of kindness is most certainly but in very unexpected ways returned with multiple doses of kindness or circumstances that almost always come from somewhere else, often not from the recipient of the first dose.

Unfortunately, there is another human condition that is also well known to be true.  It is the direct opposite of the effects of kindness and if a dose of it is dispensed, unexpected doses will be returned with the same certainty. The ancient, though now extinct, language of Sanskrit gave us the one word that describes that ancient principle that we  know as karma. (Of course, from the original Hindu philosophy, karma comes as either good or bad, while today, we commonly associate it only with bad connotations).

That sentence from a fictional character named Sally stayed with me and I know that the reader of this musing will come to know and understand as well. I hope that those six words will resonate with you as it had with me.  More importantly, I hope that more than resonance will come out of it because if life were a piece of music, kindness ought to be reprised over and over by all of us.