Living through the manifold phases of existence unveils a multiplicity of new things. This is a truism worn smooth by repetition. Yet the true distinction among us lies not in the mere accumulation of years, but in how we receive and interpret the lessons life presses upon us.
We are all apprentices to the same passage of time, yet each drafts a different manuscript from its teachings. Some drift through their days because breathing requires no reason, while others stagger under the weight of a reality that defies their grasp. A fortunate few perceive existence as a sacred trust, a purpose breathed into them like a flame; many become so entangled in the machinery of living that they never pause to ask what life might mean, or why it was contrived in this peculiar fashion.
The curious ones, those blessed with what Keats called “negative capability,” embrace life’s magnificent absurdity, finding in its chaos a strange and vibrant coherence. Others plumb its depths and glimpse something infinite shimmering beyond the flesh—as Rumi did when he wrote, “You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop.”
Some, like the bleak-eyed pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer describes, see only wretchedness and conclude that existence is a bitter joke with no punchline. And then there are those who, having tasted all these possibilities, understand that life must be lived in its full diversity. They learn not merely that everything teaches, but that the ultimate lesson is this: beneath our elaborate philosophies and desperate strivings, we are called to be kind, to love without reservation, to hold each other with the tenderness that Tagore called “the signature of God.” For as Dostoevsky reminds us through Father Zosima, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams,” yet it is precisely this love—earthly, demanding, and redemptive—that transforms the bewildering chaos of experience into something approaching wisdom.
The profoundest truths that life imparts are always simple. Not merely simple to grasp, but simple to enact. As the Gospel of Matthew reminds us, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” There is a primordial innocence in genuine action that requires no elaborate scaffolding.
Yet we, in our cleverness, construct labyrinths where paths would suffice. When we abandon simplicity, we abandon truth; and when truth becomes unbearable, we summon lies to console us. But a lie is a hungry thing. It demands sustenance, calls forth other lies to guard it, until we find ourselves entombed in an architecture of falsehood of our own design. An ancient Chinese proverb warns, “A single lie discovered is enough to cast doubt on all truths you might utter.”
Every action we perform, every word we release into the world, every thought we nourish in the silence of our minds—these are never private matters. They ripple outward across the vast web of human meaning, disturbing or calming waters we cannot see.
John Donne’s meditation was not merely poetry but ontology: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We are participants in a collective conversation that spans generations, and our smallest gestures echo through chambers we will never enter.
Lao Tzu understood this when he wrote, “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” The Bhagavad Gita, too, counsels that one’s own dharma, however imperfectly performed, is superior to another’s dharma well executed—for authenticity carries a weight that mere correctness cannot match.
A simple, truthful action or word causes the vast system no disturbance unless the system itself has grown so estranged from truth that honesty becomes a kind of heresy. In such times, as the Dhammapada teaches, “Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if you are asked for little.” Yet even then, the fault lies not in simplicity but in the world’s complicated estrangement from it. The Buddha himself offered the most direct instruction: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
It remains absolutely easy to be kind, to be simple, to be true. Nice things come naturally. They ask only that we stop obstructing their flow with our defences and calculations. As Lao Tzu observed, “Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.”
The difficulty arises not from the act itself, but from our suspicion that anything so effortless cannot possibly be enough. We forget what Mister Rogers told us across generations: “There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.” In that gentle repetition lies the whole of wisdom, simple enough for a child to understand, profound enough to occupy a lifetime of practice.
The harvest of simplicity is peace—a peace that deepens with recollection, that returns unbidden in quiet moments like the fragrance of rain on dry earth. Simple and good deeds possess this miraculous property: they lighten the soul even as they are performed, and when memory retrieves them decades later, they arrive not as burdens but as blessings. They ask nothing of us except that we recall them, and in that recalling, we are restored. As the Upanishads teach, “When a man has realised the Self, all desires vanish, and he abides in peace.” There is a self-forgetfulness in genuine goodness that liberates us from the endless demands of the ego.
Lies, dishonesty, and evil carry a different destiny. They remain like that incorrigible scrap of plastic buried in the soil—indestructible, unreconciled, forever refusing to become part of the earth’s wholesome economy. The metaphor is painfully apt: these moral pollutants do not decompose. They wait. And when they surface, whether through some accident of memory or the slow erosion of time’s concealments, they bring only torment. The Prophet Muhammad spoke of this when he said, “Beware of envy, for envy consumes good deeds just as fire consumes wood.” But perhaps more terribly, he also warned, “A sign of a hypocrite is that when he speaks, he lies; when he promises, he breaks it; and when he is trusted, he betrays.” Such betrayals of truth become permanent residents in the chambers of conscience.
This persistence of wrongdoing is not mere superstition but a profound psychological and spiritual truth. Nietzsche, that great unmasker of human pretension, observed: ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.” Yet the yielding is never complete; the deed remains, submerged but intact.
Shakespeare understood this haunting quality of transgression when Lady Macbeth, in her sleepwalking, cries, “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” and “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” The blood she cannot see, she cannot cease to feel.
There is a terrible poetry in this asymmetry. Good deeds dissolve into the fabric of life, becoming indistinguishable from the goodness they nourish; bad deeds remain discrete, identifiable, and refuse assimilation. The Dhammapada expresses this with devastating clarity: “He who has done what is good is delighted, and rejoices in the delight; he who has done what is evil burns with remorse, in this world and the next.” The burning does not cease because the deed cannot be undone.
George Herbert, the metaphysical poet, captured the generative power of goodness in his simple couplet: “Do good; then do good again; / That is the only life that makes a friend.” But for the lie, for the evil act, there is no such generativity—only sterile reproduction, lie begetting lie, until the whole structure collapses or, worse, stands as a permanent monument to our failure.
As Hannah Arendt noted in her study of evil, what shocked her most was its banality, its lack of depth, its utter shallowness—yet this shallowness does not make it less enduring. The plastic scrap does not need depth to persist; it needs only our inability to undo what we have done.
Thus, the choice between simplicity and complication, between truth and falsehood, is ultimately a choice between two kinds of eternity: the eternity of peace that deepens with memory, and the eternity of torment that never releases its hold.
The Greeks understood this in their myth of the Furies, who pursue the wrongdoer across oceans and generations. Sophocles knew it when he wrote, “Time, which sees all things, has found you out.” And Jesus knew it when he promised, “The truth shall make you free”—free, we might add, from the plastic that will not rot, the memory that will not heal, the lie that will not die.
Years ago, I encountered a person whom I casually praised; a simple observation about his hair and dressing sense. A sentence that cost me nothing, required no effort, demanded no performance. It was the kind of remark we make and forget, lighter than a passing cloud. Yet that man never forgot. From that moment, he followed my work, spoke generously of me wherever he went, and carried my name into rooms I would never enter.
Nearly a decade later, he invited me to his wedding, and when we met, he greeted me with such warmth, such genuine respect, that I found myself moved and bewildered. What had I done to deserve this? The intrigue finally pressed me to ask: “Why do you give me such regard? I don’t think I deserve so much.”
He laughed at first—a gentle, self-deprecating laugh—but after a pause, he said with an affection that still warms me, “I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve liked you ever since you told me you liked my hair and dressing. It sounds funny and selfish, doesn’t it?” He laughed again, but I understood. A single moment of genuine, uncalculated kindness had planted itself in his memory and grown, over a decade, into something neither of us could have predicted.
This is the hidden power and beauty of goodness: we never know which of our small kindnesses will take root, which simple words will become someone’s interior shelter. As the poet Rumi observed, “These words we speak—they are not born in the throat but in the eternity before breath.” A compliment freely given is like a seed carried by the wind; we cannot control where it falls or what it becomes.
Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor of Rome, understood this economy of generosity when he wrote, “The universe is transformation; life is opinion.” What was my opinion about a man’s hair but a fleeting impression? Yet to him, it became a foundation. It is not necessary to remember such things for them to retain their power.
Indeed, the beauty of simple goodness is that it works whether we remember or not. But when we do recall, when memory retrieves these moments from the archive of years, they never disappoint. They arrive bearing only peace, only warmth, only the quiet astonishment that something so small could matter so much. G.K. Chesterton captured this when he wrote, “Gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” In recalling such moments, we experience precisely that: happiness made richer by our own wonder that such happiness exists.
The contrast with dishonesty could not be starker. A lie from the past does not wait patiently to bless us; it waits to wound us. It may remain buried for years, even decades, but it does not decompose. Like radioactive matter, it continues emitting its poison whether we acknowledge it or not. A hidden falsehood in a relationship, if exposed, can shatter what years of honesty have built.
Shakespeare, that cartographer of the human heart, knew this: “Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.” And what is a lie but a kind of murder, the killing of what is real? Evil possesses this terrible longevity. It outlives its moment, outlasts its purpose, outwaits its perpetrator.
The Dhammapada warns, “As rust corrodes the very iron that breeds it, so transgression leads the wrongdoer to the evil state.” The rust does not stop; it continues its work invisibly, inevitably. The Zoroastrian scriptures, too, speak of the lie as that which “ages the world” and prevents its renewal. A single dishonest act, however buried, remains capable of resurrection, and its resurrection is always a kind of death.
The man at his wedding taught me something I have never forgotten: we are custodians of each other’s memories. What we place in another’s keeping—whether kindness or cruelty, truth or falsehood—remains there, preserved beyond our intention, beyond our awareness, beyond our control.
The soul, as the Upanishads teach, is “smaller than a grain of rice, larger than all worlds,” and within that paradoxical smallness, it holds everything we have given it. The question each moment asks us is simple: what do we wish to store in the hearts of others? What do we wish to find, decades hence, when memory unexpectedly opens its doors? For good lives softly, asking nothing, demanding nothing, yet ready always to bless us when we return to it.
Evil lives loudly, even in silence, waiting to collect its debt. The choice between them is the choice between two kinds of eternity: the eternity that nourishes, and the eternity that consumes.
There is nothing more simple to do than being kind. Indeed, kindness is not a skill to be acquired but a memory to be recovered. It inheres in us like the pulse, like the breath, like the body’s quiet wisdom of healing its own wounds. We are born into this world reaching for connection; the infant’s first gesture is not a fist but an open hand.
Mencius, the great Confucian philosopher, understood this when he wrote that all humans possess a “heart-mind that cannot bear to see the suffering of others.” He illustrated it with the example of anyone suddenly seeing a child about to fall into a well. Immediately, without calculation, without thought of reward or reputation, one feels alarm and compassion. This is not learned behaviour; it is our original nature.
Yet we complicate what requires no complication. We arrive at workplaces or neighbourhoods carrying an invisible armour of otherness, convinced that those around us are competitors for scarce goods—attention, advancement, security. This sense of competitive otherness twists our inherited attributes until kindness seems like weakness, generosity like naivety.
We forget what Lao Tzu knew: “The sage has no fixed mind; he takes as his own the mind of the people.” To take another’s mind as one’s own is to dissolve the illusion of separation, to recognise that the boundary between self and other is permeable, negotiable, perhaps finally illusory.
But the inner voice never ceases its gentle guidance. However muffled by ambition or fear, it continues whispering what we have always known: be kind, be kind, be kind. The Upanishads speak of this voice as the antaryamin, the inner controller, the witness who dwells in the heart and knows our true nature. To ignore it is not merely to act against others but to act against oneself. As the Prophet Muhammad said, “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” This is not a command to feel what we cannot feel, but a recognition that the heart’s architecture is symmetrical. What we withhold from others, we ultimately withhold from ourselves.
The strange labour of unkindness deserves our attention. To be unkind requires effort, intention, and a sustained will to harm or diminish another. You cannot be unkind by accident; it demands that you carry that unkind feeling in your heart, tend it, nourish it, protect it from the natural erosions of time and forgetfulness. This is exhausting work.
The heart, that miraculous organ, was never designed for such cargo. It is meant for circulation, for giving and receiving, for the endless movement of affection. When we store unkindness there, it stagnates. It turns to poison. And poison, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet observed, works from within: “’Twill prove a precious toxic to the soul.”
Unkindness does not simply wound the other; it excavates something from ourselves. It leaves a cavity where connection once lived, an emptiness that no subsequent kindness can quite repair. The Dhammapada warns: “He who harbours thoughts of hurt, who is not restrained in deed—he drifts far from the simple peace, far from the shore of freedom.” The drifting is not punishment but consequence; we have made ourselves unfit for the very peace we seek.
Kindness, by contrast, requires no effort when we keep it simple. It flows as water does, seeking its level and following the path of least resistance. This is not to say that kindness is always easy in difficult circumstances, but that its fundamental motion is natural, unforced, consonant with our deepest design. And it does not burden the heart; it lightens it.
Every act of kindness is also a kind of release, a liberation from the prison of self-concern. Rumi knew this secret: “The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door opens.” Kindness is such acceptance, acceptance of our connection to others, acceptance of our role as givers and receivers in the great economy of being.
The heart kept light by kindness is not a heart that avoids suffering but one that refuses to add to the world’s store of it. It is the heart described by the Tao Te Ching: “I have three treasures. Guard and keep them: The first is deep love, the second is frugality, and the third is not daring to be ahead of the world.” Deep love—this is kindness without complication. Frugality—this is not wasting the heart on what it cannot hold. Not daring to be ahead—this is releasing the competitive otherness that makes kindness seem costly.
When I was younger—in those college and university years—I was deeply impressed by intelligence. I told you earlier that different stages of life teach different things, but only to those who remain awake, who observe and feel and truly inhabit their own becoming. In that eventful stage, I looked up to people as though they were thinking machines, exquisite mechanisms of cognition.
I would listen to a teacher and marvel at the vastness of their understanding; how they grasped concepts, how knowledge resided in them, how they spoke with consistency, dressed with purpose, wrote with precision. The same reverence I extended to great books and their authors, to sportsmen whose bodies obeyed their intentions, to actors who wore other selves like garments, to philosophers who thought the unthinkable, to doctors who held life in their hands. They all impressed me with their ideas, their words, their mannerisms—the whole performance of cultivated excellence.
Now, having lived long enough to shed some certainties, I find myself impressed differently. Those achievements still deserve appreciation; I do not diminish them. But something simpler has claimed my deeper admiration. It is kindness—that unassuming, ever-present possibility—that now moves me most profoundly.
The kindness in my mother’s affection for me, wordless and unconditional, asking nothing, giving everything. The kindness in a street vendor’s words as he hands me vegetables, his greeting carrying no calculation, only the ancient human ritual of exchange made warm by presence. The kindness in my simple village acquaintances, whose “Assalamualikum” falls on you like a benediction because it expects nothing in return. The kindness with which a shopkeeper smiles, not the professional smile of commerce but the genuine one that remembers we are humans before we are customers. The kindness of a stranger in a crowded place who stops, truly stops, to guide you to the right path, treating your confusion as worthy of their time.
These moments have become my teachers. They have shown me what Mencius meant when he said that the great man is one who does not lose his child’s heart. For the child’s heart knows nothing of impressive ideas or intellectual achievement; it knows only the direct language of affection, the immediate grammar of care. The child does not analyse kindness; it receives kindness, and in receiving, learns what the world might be.
All humans, I have come to understand, do not need impressive ideas or great books to be happy. These are adornments, luxuries, the beautiful superfluities of civilization. What they need, what we all need, is kindness. And kindness finds its form not in treatises or lectures but in a helping hand extended, a smile offered freely, laughter shared, a handshake that means I see you, a simple word or two that says you matter.
The Buddha taught that “hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.” That rule operates not in grand gestures but in the smallest transactions of daily life. The Prophet Muhammad said, “Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever is not kind has no faith.” Not faith in doctrines or propositions, but faith in the fundamental decency that binds us one to another.
Tagore, the great singer of the ordinary divine, wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted, and behold, service was joy.” The service he speaks of is not dramatic sacrifice but the quiet, continuous kindness that asks nothing for itself.
There is a passage in the Mahabharata where a mongoose comes to witness a great sacrifice and declares it worthless because no gift was given to the hungry. Then he tells of a poor family who, facing starvation, divided their last meal with a stranger—that, he says, was true sacrifice. The moral is not that grand offerings are meaningless, but that kindness in extremity reveals what kindness always is: the recognition that another’s need is as real as our own.
I think now of that street vendor, of my mother, of the stranger who guided me. None of them will appear in any history book. None will be remembered for their ideas or their achievements. Yet they have achieved something more enduring: they have kept the human contract intact. They have reminded me that beneath all our philosophies and ambitions, beneath our intelligence and our accomplishments, there remains the simple, irreducible requirement of being kind to one another.
Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.” The dragons we face—loneliness, estrangement, the cold mechanics of a world that often forgets to care—are defeated not by great ideas but by small kindnesses. Every smile is a small act of courage. Every genuine greeting is a small beauty. And these accumulate, these build, these eventually become the world we actually want to live in.
So now, when I am impressed by someone, it is not first by their intelligence or their achievements, but by their kindness. For intelligence can serve cruelty, and achievement can forget humanity. But kindness remains the one thing that never betrays us. It is the language we spoke before we learned words, and the language we will need when words finally fail.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to [email protected]
