Throw Out Your Label Maker
Throwing out your label maker is a kindness to yourself and to others.
When Walt Whitman said in Song of Myself, “Do I contradict myself? I am large. I contain multitudes,” he was describing the human condition. Any label we pin on ourselves that casts us as being “that way” (good or bad in any of their incarnations) relegates us to the status of hero or villain in a soap opera or a comic strip. When we get stuck on a restrictive mental model of who we think we are, we deny the truth that we are, in fact, complex creatures: indeed, we are multitudes.
A former neighbor thinks I’m a kind person. She’s both right and wrong.
One morning she called and asked if I’d drive her to the local walk-in clinic. She was experiencing symptoms in her chest that had her worried. She has a heart condition and didn’t know whether it was her heart or just a panic attack. I, of course, took her, as I’m sure most people would if a neighbor asked for help. The willingness to help others in stressful conditions is part of our nature. (It was a panic attack; her heart was fine.)
I performed a couple of other “kindnesses” for her over the half-dozen years we were neighbors, which is the basis for her assessment of me. She didn’t experience me when I did or said unkind things. Not that I’m intentionally unkind but, as I assume happens for most of us, it happens occasionally when I’m not present and sensitive to the space or situation I find myself in.
The truth is that we tend to label people, especially those we have limited contact with, as the characteristic they manifest most often in our experience of them. We file them away in our mental filing cabinet under HONEST, KIND, CONSIDERATE, THOUGHTFUL, FAIR, COURAGEOUS, EMPATHIC—or ANGRY, UNJUST, UNFEELING, CRUEL. These are human characteristics we all display—or at least feel—on occasion. We do ourselves and others an injustice when we generalize the behaviors we observe and then label the one who manifests them as being that way: He’s an angry person. She’s a thoughtful woman. That child is a bully.
Yes, I sometimes act kindly, but that doesn’t make me a kind person any more than making an unkind comment would make me an unkind person. We’re wise to see both ourselves and others as the complex beings we are rather than as caricatures who animate only the behaviors we observe or focus our attention on.
Here’s an example of how it worked in real life on a shopping occasion prior to the advent of the coronavirus.
At the top of my long to-do list was a trip to get groceries. Gray clouds hung over the city as I navigated my way through the construction around the entrance to my apartment complex, delaying and complicating forays into the outside world.
By the time I had made it to the interstate a half-mile away, my mood was as gray as the day, and it didn’t improve as I encountered heavy freeway traffic. I gritted my teeth as a line of cars before me took the same exit I was taking, slowing me down further. Nor did circling the crowded store parking lot waiting for someone to vacate a space lighten my inner sky.
Inside the store, I maneuvered aisles clogged with shopping carts pushed by other shoppers also focused on getting in and out as quickly as possible, their eyes scanning shelves for the next item on their list.
It wasn’t until I found myself standing in the bagged-nut aisle next to a slight, fragile-looking woman with short-cropped gray hair who reminded me of my mother before she died at the age of ninety-eight that I allowed my humanity to reassert itself. A head shorter than me, as my mother was, she was having difficulty seeing and reaching items on the top shelf. As it happened, we were looking for the same thing.
As I took a bag of almonds to put into my cart, I asked her if it was what she was looking for. She graced me with a radiant smile as she acknowledged it was, remarking on how her short height prevented her from seeing them. I handed her the bag I was holding, and she thanked me with another smile as we each continued with our shopping.
If someone had stopped this woman and asked about the person who had helped her find what she was looking for, she probably would have described me as “kind”—hardly a word appropriate to the thoughts and mood I’d manifested prior to our encounter, which would, if observed, have relegated me to a different drawer in her mental filing cabinet.
What greater kindness can we offer one another, especially in this time of great divisiveness, than the willingness to see ourselves and others as the complex, multifaceted beings we in fact are?
(Adapted from the soon-to-be-released book, Smiling at Strangers.)