Amanda Reid | Intervention

Reid about it! | The importance of intervening niceties

By Amanda Reid 12/05/16 10:29pm

As a misanthrope, there’s a truth I’m beginning to accept, and that is that my day is made better by the kindness of strangers.

A few months back, I found myself crying in public one day — as I am wont to do — when a stranger approached me. I was sitting in Fisher-Bennett checking my email before I quickly and unexpectedly became overwhelmed by stress and allowed a crescendo of emotionality to take over. As I tried to hide the sobs and the hiccups, a stranger came up and asked if I was okay, and if I needed a tissue.

I was taken aback at first. I blundered through some kind of a thank you (“uh, yeah, I’m okay, thank you, thank you”) before leaving out of embarrassment. It made me think of the times when I experienced some kind of personal crisis in public, and how normal it was for nobody to respond. And as an experienced crier, I had never encountered something like this before.

This stranger probably wouldn’t have been able to reduce my stress, or make me feel better about it, but the interaction wasn’t about solving my problems. I was just comforted in knowing that a complete stranger with no vested interest in me could still care.

I’ve decided to label this moment an ‘intervening nicety’ because even though it wasn’t a large scale gesture, it was still somehow effective: After leaving the scene, I walked outside and found myself feeling better. I stopped crying, pulled myself together and went to class as if nothing had happened.

It’s never easy to intervene. It’s never easy to reach out and be nice, even when it comes to small actions, like holding the door open, saying thank you, picking up a dropped pencil. These actions aren’t particularly necessary, nor are they always sincere. Asking “how are you?” to the local Starbucks barista isn’t going to affect their life. Being nice can be misconstrued as a nicety, i.e. glib, performative acts that parade as sincere gestures.

Being nice is tedious and being extra nice is hard. Sometimes, our actions, instead of being nice, are dismissive. Sometimes we reject being nice in favor of being a straight-up asshole. When you intervene in a stranger’s life, even if it’s just to compliment their purple beanie, it takes something out of you because you’d have to be constantly aware of the people around you. And nobody’s that caring.

Let me bring up a mind-gratingly annoying cliché before I continue: Everyone is flawed. It’s almost a habit born out of a necessity to call ourselves flawed, because we need to validate our actions. So I don’t expect all of us to be the most altruistic person in any given situation.

But still, don’t we owe it to ourselves to understand that others might be going through, in varying degrees of intensity, some form of stress, grievance or pain? If we start to leave out simple niceties, we fall into a kind of Tragedy-of-the-Commons situation, where lack of centered responsibility leads to the devaluation of the social space that we share.

I’ve given up on trying to be completely and constantly altruistic, which seems impossible. So, I’ve decided to focus more on little gestures of kindness. Even little things like a nod or a smile can be as equally uplifting as big grand gestures, like helping to carry groceries. Though these things might go unnoticed to some, it is worth it.

Every so often, I unexpectedly think of that intervening stranger. Even though now I wish I could’ve gotten the guy’s name so I could say thank you, I realize that the point of that gesture was that it was given without expectation of a reciprocating reward. Intervening niceties work when they happen unconditionally.

When a stranger is nice to me, it reaffirms that goodness is real, that it exists, and that I can be a part of it too. Even if it isn’t completely sincere, being nice works — it makes our days better. Intervening doesn’t have to be about solving any problems, it can just be about the act itself.

In the ensuing couple days, we should try our best not to forget, dismiss or tread on each other. Being present for strangers, and just being nice, regardless of whether or not it helps, will go a long way. We all deserve some goodness, even if it’s just in the form of a nicety.

AMANDA REID is a College junior from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, studying cinema studies & English. Her email address is amreid@sas.upenn. edu. “Reid About It!” usually appears every other Tuesday.