In Praise of Nice People

We sometimes hear reminders about the importance of appreciating kind people. The people who are nice, who message you regularly, who ask how you are, who support your ambitions, who want the best for you. The ones who are thoughtful and don’t flare up – and who will write sweetly to you, hoping you have a good night.

The advice can sound remote, mechanical, sentimental. We suspect: surely there must be something wrong with these ‘good people’ if we need reminders to appreciate them. Surely truly good people – people we should really bother with – assert their value without any need for artificial prompts.

But this is to forget something key about human nature: that we tend to categorically –and very tragically – reject, ignore and trample upon goodness and niceness whenever it crosses our path. We are spoilt children who fail to pay heed to most of the glories we are gifted; who care so much more for drama and pain than repose and sweetness.

Learning to Notice Everyday Goodness

There is no greater example of this than in our attitude to the beauty of our world. We omit to notice springtime, the light through the trees, the sky at dusk, the lemons on the sideboard, the path through the forest, the colours of the sea at the shoreline. We hardly pay attention to the summer or the dignity of autumn – and that is why we have, collectively, accorded such honour to those talented evocators of the world’s sublimity: Cézanne, Renoir, Pissarro, Van Gogh, Vermeer, de Hooch, Hammershøi and so on.

We wouldn’t be so moved by their works if we weren’t normally so accustomed to look past what they are attempting to draw our attention to. Our respect for their art is, in part, a piece of self-criticism and atonement. We can read their canvases as an infinitely subtle attempt to tell us, in effect: look up at the sky as you walk to work; stop being so ungrateful to springtime; notice the hope and cheer available in a vase of flowers; enough of your focus on strife and ugliness.

The emotion we may feel in front of their paintings is bound up with a semi-conscious sense of how far we have let ourselves drift from what we should rightly love – if we were sane and thoughtful.

Appreciating Kind People Before It’s Too Late

Much the same dispiriting ingratitude applies to people as it does to flowers or seasons. Here too, we grow inured to beauty. Here too, we fail to appreciate what is special. Here too, we need reminders. We need someone to say: stop taking generosity for granted. Don’t mistake calm for tedium. Properly pay homage to the glory of forgiveness. Go back and call the person you never thanked for their patience.

Instead, we seem magnetically drawn to complicated, tormented types who remind us of other complicated characters we grew up around. It may be time to break the pattern and – in the same way as we momentarily vowed to do last spring in the poppy field or on our way out of the exhibition in Paris – remind ourselves to pay genuine homage to what, and who, is good, kind and true before it is too late.

Appreciating kind people is not a sentimental act but a recognition that, in a world full of turmoil, gentleness is a form of quiet heroism. Life is too awful for us to treat niceness with anything other than wholehearted reverence.