If Kindness Got You High, Would You Share More of It?

There is a question I have been thinking about lately:

If kindness got you high, would you share more of it?

It is a little funny on the surface. Maybe even a little ridiculous. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there is something underneath the joke worth paying attention to.

Most of us understand the desire to feel better. We look for things that help us relax, laugh, quiet our minds or get a little distance from whatever has been weighing on us. When we discover something that genuinely makes life better, we often want the people we care about to experience it too.

Kindness is one of the few things we can give away over and over without really having less of it ourselves. Yet somehow, it can still become something we ration.

We usually see the moment, not the whole story

It is easy to judge people based on the few seconds of their lives that happen to intersect with ours.

Maybe the cashier seems distracted. Someone takes too long when the traffic light changes. A friend does not answer a message. A coworker seems unusually quiet. A family member responds more sharply than usual.

We see what happened in front of us, but we almost never know everything that happened before it.

The cashier may have received terrible news that morning. The person sitting at the green light may be driving home from a hospital. The friend who has gone quiet might not know how to explain what they are going through. Someone who seems impatient may simply be exhausted from carrying something they have not told anyone about.

None of that means hurtful behavior should automatically be excused. Compassion does not require us to ignore harm or pretend everything is okay. It simply leaves enough room for the possibility that another person’s story is bigger than the part we can see.

Sometimes grace begins with recognizing how little we actually know.

Most kindness is smaller than we imagine

When we think about kindness, we sometimes picture something significant. Giving money to someone in need. Showing up during a crisis. Volunteering our time. Helping someone through one of the hardest moments of their life.

Those things matter deeply, but most opportunities for kindness are much less dramatic.

Kindness can be letting someone merge in front of you instead of speeding up. It can be asking someone how they are doing and giving them enough time to answer honestly. It can be thanking the person whose work usually goes unnoticed or checking on the friend who has been quieter than usual.

Sometimes kindness is simply choosing not to send the angry response you already typed.

These moments rarely feel important while they are happening. Nobody is going to write a story about the time you were patient with a tired cashier or chose not to embarrass someone who made a mistake.

But small does not mean meaningless.

A few kind words can change the direction of someone’s afternoon. A moment of patience can keep a difficult situation from becoming worse. Being treated with dignity can remind someone who feels invisible that they still matter.

Sometimes an afternoon is all a person is trying to get through.

Kindness tends to travel

One of the beautiful things about unexpected kindness is that it often changes more than the person receiving it.

Someone gives you patience when you expected irritation and you find yourself becoming a little more patient with the next person. Someone listens without immediately trying to correct you and later you notice yourself listening differently. Someone shows you grace during a moment you are not especially proud of and suddenly you understand grace a little better.

We rarely get to see how far those moments travel.

You may encourage someone who later goes home and has more patience with their children. You may listen to someone who later recognizes that another person needs someone to listen to them. You may offer dignity to someone who had begun to believe nobody noticed them anymore.

There is no way to measure most of this.

That does not make it less real.

Jesus had a habit of noticing people

One thing that stands out to me when I read about Jesus is how often He noticed the people other people had learned to overlook.

He noticed the sick. He noticed the grieving. He noticed people carrying shame. He noticed people others had already decided were not worth much attention. Again and again, He stopped for individuals who could easily have disappeared into the crowd.

Jesus taught people, of course. But He also made room for people.

There is a difference.

Sometimes Christians become so focused on what someone should believe, what they should change or what advice they need that we overlook the person standing in front of us. We can become very good at having answers while forgetting how powerful it can be to simply treat another human being with compassion.

Ephesians 4:32 says:

“Be kind and compassionate to one another.”

There is nothing flashy about that instruction. It does not require a platform, a title or a perfect understanding of someone else’s situation.

It simply asks us to be kind.

That can be much harder than it sounds.

Kindness still needs boundaries

There is an important distinction here because kindness is sometimes confused with allowing people to treat us however they want.

That is not kindness.

You can be compassionate and still say no. You can forgive someone and still decide that a relationship needs distance. You can understand that someone is hurting without allowing their pain to continually become your pain.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can say is, “I care about you, but I cannot keep doing this.”

Boundaries do not cancel compassion. Honesty does not automatically become cruelty simply because another person does not like hearing it.

Real kindness recognizes the humanity of the other person without requiring you to erase your own.

That matters, especially for people who have spent much of their lives believing that loving others means constantly sacrificing themselves.

Compassion and wisdom can occupy the same space.

What if we treated kindness like something valuable?

That brings me back to the original question.

If kindness produced an immediate rush of happiness every time we gave it away, maybe we would think about it differently. We might talk about it more. Share it more freely. Make sure the people we loved got some. Maybe we would even go looking for opportunities to give it away.

But kindness does not always reward us immediately.

Sometimes nobody says thank you. Sometimes the person remains rude. Sometimes you extend patience and nothing changes. Sometimes you choose grace and nobody even realizes what it cost you.

That can make kindness feel wasted.

I do not think it is.

Some of the most meaningful things we give other people are things we will never see the result of. A sentence they remember years later. A little dignity returned during an embarrassing moment. A conversation that reminded them they were not completely alone. A small act of grace on a day when they had begun to lose hope.

We may never know what those moments became.

Maybe we do not need to.

Final thoughts

If kindness got you high, maybe we would all be a little more generous with it.

But perhaps there is a better reason to share it.

Every person you encounter is living a life every bit as complicated as your own. They have fears you cannot see, people they worry about, mistakes they regret, things they are trying to heal from and days when they are simply doing their best to keep moving.

You will not always know who desperately needs a little grace.

So when you can, give it anyway.

Be generous with patience. Be generous with encouragement. Be generous with the benefit of the doubt. Tell someone you appreciate them. Check on the quiet friend. Listen a little longer. Make room for the possibility that the person frustrating you today might be carrying something you would understand completely if you knew the whole story.

And when you have the choice between making somebody’s day a little harder or a little lighter, choose lighter whenever you can.

There is already plenty of the other stuff going around.