The ability to notice others requires a suspension of oneself, to put their needs above one's own. I love how artist and illustrator Maira Kalman walks behind people, sometimes drawing or photographing them or simply "stepping as they step." Her illustrations and notes are full of thoughtfulness for others. What would happen if you put yourself in another's footprints and stepped outside your needs? Even if just for a moment? What would happen if you spent all your days doing it?

Christie Watson (born in 1976) was a nurse in the British healthcare system for two decades. She began in 1994 as a nursing student in mental health clinics and then rotated into emergency care and midwifery. As with most in the caring profession, hers was a life of tending to others. The Language of Kindness is a story of her time as a nurse, indeed. But it also concerns things beyond words, relationships outside of language, gestures of action, engagement, and caring.

What does such a life cost the caregiver?

Most days I feel overwhelmed, and some days completely out of my depth. On other days I feel disgusted, and occasionally simply bored and tired. [...] Nursing people means doing for them what they would normally do when they have no will to do it until they have the will to do it.

Watson did not consider entering the nursing profession to exercise kindness as a daily feat, but the first time she watched nurses in full swing, she knew extraordinary compassion was needed.

I worked for Community Service Volunteers, which was the only agency I could find at the time that accepted sixteen-year-olds instead of eighteen-year-olds and provided accommodation. I was sent to a residential centre run by the Spastics Society (now called Scope), earning £20 pocket money a week by looking after adults with severe physical disabilities: helping them to toilet, eat and dress. It was the first time I felt as if I was doing something worthwhile. I shaved my head and lived in charity-shop clothes, spending all my pocket money on cider and tobacco. I had nothing, but I was happy. It was the first time I'd been around nurses. I watched the qualified nurses with the kind of intensity that a child watches her parents when she's sick. My eyes didn't leave them. I had no language for what they were doing, or for their job. 'You should do nursing, one of them said. "They give you a bursary and somewhere to live.'

"Simple Acts of Kindness I" from Singapore-born illustrator Marilyn Yee for The Examined Life.

“Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness,” wrote Mary Oliver in my favorite book of poetry. We draw kindness from wells of generosity and replenish as we can with friends, nature, rest, and self-care.

But some exceptional individuals give and give and never seem to outstep empathy. For most of us who struggle to be kind, making a profession out of it seems superhuman and self-sacrificial. In a way, Watson admits, it is.

Nursing carries with it the echoes of history: nurses would have lost their jobs, had they married. There are, of course, plenty of married nurses now; and, as a junior nurse, I knew a large group of unmarried matrons in the profession, some of whom were living in Spencer House nurses' home, a place we referred to as 'Spinster House', as we failed to imagine how much of a person good nursing requires. Nursing is a career that demands a chunk of your soul on a daily basis. The emotional energy needed to care for people at their most vulnerable is not limitless and there have been many days when, like most nurses, I have felt spent, devoid of any further capacity to give.

There are two glittering insights from Watson's beautiful, funny, and occasionally heartbreaking narrative in The Language of Kindness.

First, our intensely-felt life is bearable because it's not done in isolation. Psychologist Irvin Yalom argued that human connectedness alleviates death anxiety. It reminds me of poet John Keats, who spent the last few years of his incredibly short life dying from tuberculous and was never without the company of others.  Even when we are apart -  as happened to so many during the worst of the Covid crisis - we remain connected: "We'll get through this, all of us, together" Zadie Smith wrote encouragingly.

For Watson, too, connectivity delivers fortitude.

There is a beauty in A&E, too: a togetherness, where all conflict is forgotten. There is no sleepwalking through the day, as an A&E nurse. Every day is intensely felt and examined and truly lived. But my hand always shakes when I push open the door - even now, after many years as a nurse. I've never worked solely in A&E, although I spend a lot of time there, in my job as a resuscitation officer. Nursing requires fluidity, being able to adapt and push energy in the direction where patients and colleagues need you, even if it is unfamiliar. Still, A&E scares me. Unlike the staff in the canteen who would out the call for Betty, the staff in the A&E only put out a 2222 crash call to the resuscitation team if things are desperate, or if trauma arrives that requires specialist doctors.

Rudbeckias mean "support and encouragement." Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The second heart-warming insight in The Language of Kindness is that we all have vast stores of kindness, often unrealized. It is something we have to mobilize and practice. Perhaps it is feeble-minded of me, but I've always believed we are naturally kind, giving, and trusting. Something in us exists to be those things, to build those social bonds.  "Be kind" is a hollow aphorism because it doesn't tell us how. Between knowing and doing is a chasm of fear. I don't pretend to know how to summon kindness, but here are a few ideas to get you thinking: An Implacable Call for Kindness.

Ultimately kindness comes from the knowledge that it will give back in turn, maybe not soon, but at some point, we will want others to do unto us as we did unto someone else. Watson continues:

Twenty years in nursing has taken so much from me but has given me back even more. What I thought nursing involved when I started: chemistry, biology, physics, pharmacology, and anatomy. What I now know to be the truth of nursing: philosophy, psychology, art, ethics, and politics. We will meet people on the way: patients, relatives, and staff—people you may recognize already. Because we are all nursed at some point in our lives. We are all nurses.

"I'm so small." said the mole." "Yes," said the boy, "but you make a huge difference." From The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

When he was injured in World War II, author Roald Dahl spent a few weeks convalescing at the field hospital and formed a sentimental attachment to his nurse and quite humorously, to her uniform:

When many days of blackness and doubt are pierced suddenly by shining images of red and gold, the pleasure that floods into your mind is overwhelming. I lay propped up on my pillows gazing through the tiny crack in one eye at these amazing sights and wondering, whether I wasn't perhaps catching a glimpse of paradise.

'What am I looking at?' I asked her.

'You are looking at a bit of my white uniform.'
From Roald Dahl's Going Solo

Spreading "ripples of kindness" throughout England, the Take Heart organization crochets pocket-sized hearts and spreads them with notes saying, "You are not alone."

"We have all nursed at some point in our lives," reminds Watson, "We are all nurses." 

I have been a nurse for twenty years. But it is only when my dad is dying, too quickly, from lung cancer, that I begin to understand the importance of kindness and the depths of humanity and philosophy underneath. When all else has failed - the chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the drugs - and hope has left the room along with the team of oncologists, radiologists, technicians, and scientists, it's the nurse at his bedside who offers something else: dignity, peace, even love.

Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Ovid illustrated the importance of such tenderness in our loving relationships, advising men to "bring remedies" to their sick lovers:

Often in autumn - what season's more fine? -
when grapes are full and blush with purple wine,
when cold descends, and heat dissolvers the chill -
in this uncertain climate, we get ill.
All health to her, but if she takes to bed -
if the unreliable sky goes to her head -
then let your love and your devotion show:
what you plant now, your sickle soon will mow.
Don't be disgusted by her foul disease,
but be the one who brings her remedies;
kisses won't tire her; let her see you cry -
let lips absorb your tears when they are dry.
From Ovid's The Art of Love

For more thoughts on kindness and how to summon it, read novelist George Saunders' Congratulations, By the Way, a simple sermon on our human legacy of kindness, or Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which argues we were "born for cooperation."

What touched me most about The Language of Kindness was Watson's ability to exist beyond words and still act and care. "Nursing is not so much about tasks," notes Watson, "but about how in every detail a nurse can provide comfort to a patient and a family... Nursing, like poetry, is the place where metaphorical and literal meanings cross borders. A hole in the heart is a hole in the heart: the nurse is the thing at the centre." 

When words are not enough, we invent new language to connect and understand. For Watson, this language is kindness.