George Saunders

But I think, especially in the Eastern traditions, kindness is a very deep topic.

Yeah, because the speech is about one very small failure of kindness when I was in grade school.

And it's kind of a confession that my anxiety prohibited me from being as kind as I would like to have been.

But then it got made into a book and I started giving interviews and suddenly I was the expert on kindness, which was the direct opposite of what was in the speech.

Well, it isn't.

It isn't.

Except I think what I found out was that there's a kind of a misperception that kindness just means being sweet all the time.

Which, of course, you know, especially now in this political moment, you can see that kindness doesn't, it can have a kind of fierceness.

It should have a kind of fierceness.

It was also interesting when I was doing interviews that people would call in and this one woman saying, I've always believed in kindness, but there's so many stupid people who don't.

So we sort of attribute it to ourselves no matter what.

For example, if you go into a coffee shop and you see that the barista has been crying, what's the kind thing to do in that case?

It might just be to be quiet and leave.

In another world, you say just the right thing, it might help.

How would you know?

You'd have to be super alert to her or his circumstance.

How do you do that?

Well, you might have to quiet your mind so you don't have some kind of pre-existing agenda.

So what I found was that this idea of kindness, which can be quite facile sometimes,

opens up some really deep concepts.