Being Kind: A Report from Inside My Own Head

The cashier at Whole Foods asked me how I was doing, and I lied to her.

Not a big lie. Just the standard-issue "Fine, thanks" that we're all trained to deploy in these situations, the social equivalent of touching your wallet when you walk past a homeless person to make sure it's still there. I wasn't fine. I'd spent the previous forty minutes stuck in traffic having an imaginary argument with someone who'd annoyed me three days ago (and who wasn't even in the car, obviously, because that would've been weird). My jaw hurt from clenching it. I had what can only be described as thought-diarrhea about a work email I needed to send but kept not sending because every draft sounded either too aggressive or too passive or too something I couldn't quite name.¹ The cashier, for her part, didn't notice my lie, or if she did notice she'd already moved on to scanning my overpriced kale, which is itself a kind of lie I tell myself about being the sort of person who eats kale before it goes bad in the vegetable drawer.

I realize this sounds insufferable: in the three seconds between her question and my automatic response, there was a moment where I saw her. Actually saw her. Not as a function in the grocery-transaction algorithm but as a person who'd asked me a question, who had her own everything, who was standing there in an unflattering vest under fluorescent lights during what was probably the middle of a long shift. And then, because I'm apparently some kind of monster, I performed "Fine, thanks" anyway and moved along like a well-programmed robot executing its social-nicety subroutine.

This bothered me more than it should have. Still does. Which is why I'm writing about it now instead of doing literally anything more productive.²

There's this concept in Buddhist practice called the monkey mind, which is about as flattering as it sounds. The idea is that human consciousness, left to its own devices, resembles a drunk monkey swinging from branch to branch, grabbing onto whatever shiny thought passes by, screeching at ghosts, making a general mess of things. The ancient texts are pretty clear about this: your brain is basically a chaos engine dressed up as rationality, producing thoughts that feel very important and very you but are mostly just random firing patterns your neurons have gotten good at.³

George Saunders, who's made a career out of being thoughtful about stuff most of us just muddle through, talks about this in terms of what he calls "brain farts." Not poetic, but accurate. He suggests that both writing and Buddhist practice offer the same basic revelation: those thoughts chattering away in your head aren't actually you. They're just happening. Like weather. You didn't cause them any more than you caused this morning's temperature, and you don't have to take ownership of them just because they showed up in your skull.⁴

This should be comforting. It's not, really. Because if the thoughts aren't me, then what is? This is where things get slippery in that specific way philosophy gets slippery when you pull on a thread and the whole sweater starts coming apart.

What neuroscience has figured out (and what Buddhists apparently knew a couple thousand years ago, which must be annoying for the neuroscientists) is that a lot of this chaos happens in what's called the default mode network (DMN), a collection of brain regions that light up when you're not focused on anything particular. When you're supposedly resting. The DMN is where you go to remember the past, imagine the future, think about what other people think about you, and generally construct what researchers call your narrative identity.⁵

Narrative identity. That's the sanitized academic term for the story you tell yourself about who you are. The story I was running when I lied to the cashier was something along the lines of: I am a person who is fine, who has it together, who doesn't burden strangers with emotional weather reports, who understands that "How are you?" isn't actually a question but a greeting ritual that requires the response "Fine" the way "Knock knock" requires "Who's there?"

But beneath that story was another story: I am a person who is not fine, who is actually kind of a mess, who spends too much time having arguments with people who aren't even present, whose emotional weather is consistently overcast with a chance of low-grade anxiety.

And beneath that story, probably, are other stories I'm not even aware I'm telling. This all the way down.⁶

Saunders makes the case, and I think he's probably right about this, that kindness is what happens when you can stop the monkey-mind long enough to actually see what would be helpful to the other person in a given moment. Not what would make you look good, not what would fulfill your idea of yourself as a helper, not what would be most efficient. Just: what would actually serve this human standing in front of you right now?

Which sounds simple.

Isn't.

The math here is uncomfortable because it requires you to temporarily abandon your own story, your own narrator's chair, your own sense of being the protagonist of This Whole Thing. You have to sort of sideways-slip out of the center of your own experience and occupy, even briefly, the strange territory of recognizing that other people are just as real as you are. That they have the same internal volume, the same ongoing crisis of self-narration, the same monkey-mind swinging around in there throwing feces at the walls of consciousness.

This recognition is what Saunders would probably call empathy, though I've always found that word too soft somehow, too much like a greeting card sentiment. What we're talking about is more like the mathematical operation of temporarily solving for a different variable. You're still you, obviously (you can't stop being you any more than you can stop having a digestive system), but you've briefly shifted the equation so that someone else's experience becomes the thing you're optimizing for.⁷

The catch? Before you can do any of that, you have to notice that you're inside a story in the first place.

So here's a thing Saunders said in an interview that's been rattling around in my head like a marble in a shoebox. He identified three awarenesses that people eventually need to wake up from what he calls "core delusions":

You're not permanent.
You're not the most important thing.
You're not separate.

These are Buddhist precepts, technically, but they're also just... true? Demonstrably true. You're going to die (sorry), you're one person among eight billion (roughly), and you're made of the same atoms as everything else and your consciousness emerges from the same basic biological machinery as everyone else's consciousness and when you die those atoms will go back into circulation and become parts of other things, possibly a tree, possibly a subway rat, probably both over sufficient time.

But knowing these things intellectually is not the same as knowing them in the way your body knows how to breathe or your hand knows how to catch something thrown at you. Intellectual knowing lives in the conscious, narrating part of your mind. The other kind of knowing lives deeper, in the place where you don't have to think about it.⁸

Things are going to get strange. Because the story you tell yourself about being you, about being permanent (at least for a while), about being the center of your experience, about being a discrete entity separate from everything else, is not wrong exactly. It's just... incomplete. A useful fiction.

And here's where I get turned around every time: if the self is a story, and stories are things we tell, then who's doing the telling? It can't be the self, because the self is the story. This feels like trying to see the back of your own head without a mirror. Or trying to get behind your own eyes to see what's looking.⁹

The weird thing about catching yourself in a moment of automatic dishonesty with a grocery store cashier is that it makes you notice how much of your life you spend on autopilot, executing pre-programmed responses to familiar stimuli. Smile. Wave. Fine, thanks. Good, you? The whole social-lubrication machinery that keeps interactions from requiring too much processing power.

Most of the time this is fine. Necessary, even. You can't bring your full attention to every moment or you'd be paralyzed by the sheer overwhelming thereness of everything. But sometimes (when you're stuck in traffic, maybe, or standing in a grocery store line, or lying awake at 2am thinking about nothing and everything) you become aware of the machinery itself. The automatic-ness. The way your brain is constantly generating a story about what's happening and why you're doing what you're doing and what it all means.

Grace Paley, the short story writer who Saunders admires maybe more than any other writer, built her entire body of work on paying a particular kind of attention to ordinary moments. Her stories are basically just people talking to each other about regular stuff (kids, money, loneliness, the weather), but underneath the talking there's this sense that she's seeing something the rest of us miss because we're too busy narrating our own experience to actually experience it.¹⁰

Saunders says that Paley taught him that "love is attention and vice versa." Which is one of those things that seems obvious once someone says it but is actually fairly strange the more you think about it. Love is attention. The quality of consciousness you bring to something. Not the feeling, not the warm fuzzy stuff, not even necessarily the desire for the other person's wellbeing (though probably that too). Just: the act of actually seeing them.

Which brings me back to the cashier. The uncomfortable part of that moment wasn't the lie itself. It was the flash of awareness that I'd seen her, really seen her as a full human person, and then chosen to not respond to what I'd seen. Chosen to stay inside my own story instead of making space for hers.

This is what Saunders means when he talks about kindness being something both greater and simpler than niceness. Niceness is easy. Niceness is the "Fine, thanks" autopilot response. Kindness would've required me to pause the monkey-mind (which was mid-argument with someone who wasn't there), notice what was actually happening (a tired person asking a question), and choose a response that served that moment rather than serving my own story about myself.¹¹

Except I didn't do any of that. I performed niceness and moved on. Kale judging me from its bag.

What I've been trying to figure out, in the days since this minor grocery store moment that should not have occupied this much of my attention, is whether the problem is that I didn't pause the story, or whether the problem is the story itself.

Because maybe the story where I'm a person who has it together, who doesn't burden strangers, who performs appropriate social niceties, is itself a form of violence. Not the dramatic kind. The mundane kind. The kind where you refuse to let another person see you because you're too busy maintaining the character you've decided you are.¹²

This is getting into territory that feels too big for a grocery store anecdote, but bear with me. There's this idea in both writing and Buddhist practice that beneath all the stories we tell about ourselves, there's something else. Some elemental whatever-it-is that doesn't need the story. Some awareness or presence or being that just is, without needing to explain itself or justify itself or maintain a coherent narrative about itself.¹³

I have no idea what to call this thing. Soul is too loaded with religious baggage. Consciousness is too clinical. Self is the thing we're trying to get beneath. Maybe it doesn't need a name. Maybe naming it is just another story.

What I do know is that the moments when I feel most actually present (as opposed to narrating my presence to myself) are the moments when I've somehow managed to short-circuit the monkey-mind and just land in whatever's happening without the commentary track. This almost never happens. But when it does, it feels less like I'm doing something and more like I've stopped doing something. Less like turning something on and more like letting something else turn off.¹⁴

Saunders has this line I keep coming back to: "Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die."

This feels true in a way that makes me want to simultaneously embrace it and run away from it. Because staying open sounds great in theory but is actually quite difficult when you're stuck in traffic running imaginary arguments and the whole point of those arguments is to feel right, to feel certain, to feel like your story makes sense.

But maybe that's the work. Not to have better stories (though probably that too), but to hold the stories more loosely. To remember that they're stories. To catch yourself in the act of narrating and just... pause. Notice. See what's actually there when you're not so busy telling yourself about what's there.¹⁵

Kindness, as I understand it now (which is to say, barely), is this: you have to be willing to temporarily forget your own story in order to see someone else's. You have to let the monkey-mind settle (or at least quiet down enough that you can hear something besides its screeching). You have to risk the brief vertigo of not being sure who you are when you're not busy telling yourself who you are.¹⁶

This all sounds very dramatic for what probably just sounds like "pay attention to people." But paying attention, it turns out, is harder than it sounds. Requires more than good intentions. Requires catching yourself in the act of not paying attention, which is most of the time, which means you're basically playing whack-a-mole with your own autopilot programming.

So I'm standing there at Whole Foods, and the cashier has moved on to the person behind me, and I'm thinking about all of this (or rather, I'm thinking about it now, several days later, after having thought about it intermittently while doing other things, because that's how thinking actually works for me, weird accumulations of attention that eventually cohere into something resembling a coherent thought). And what I land on is this:

Maybe the point isn't to never lie to cashiers. Maybe the point isn't even to be kind all the time (which seems impossible for someone with a monkey-mind as determined as mine). Maybe the point is just to notice when you've chosen the story over the seeing. To catch yourself in the act. To acknowledge the gap between what you saw and how you responded.

Not to beat yourself up about it. Just to notice.

Because noticing is the first move. The basic unit of attention. The thing that has to happen before anything else can happen. You can't pause a story you don't realize you're inside. You can't offer anything real to another person if you're too busy maintaining your character to see them.

And maybe, if you notice enough times, if you catch yourself often enough in the act of choosing story over presence, you start to get better at the pause. Better at the gap. Better at that strange sideways-slip out of your own narrator's chair and into just being here, now, with whatever's actually happening.¹⁷

I haven't been back to that Whole Foods. But I think about that cashier sometimes. Wonder if she noticed my lie. Wonder if she cared. Wonder what her day was really going on, what her story was running, what her monkey-mind was busy with while she scanned my groceries.

Probably she wasn't thinking about me at all. Probably I was just another transaction in a long series of transactions. Probably the whole interaction meant nothing to her and everything to me only because I'm the one who's been using it to think through all of this.

Which is fine. The work of paying attention doesn't require the other person to notice you're doing it. Doesn't require gratitude or acknowledgment or even awareness. The work is just the work. You see or you don't see. You pause or you don't pause. You choose the story or you choose the seeing.

Most of the time you'll choose the story. That's okay. The story is where you live. But maybe, sometimes, in the gap between stimulus and response, between question and automatic-answer, between one thought and the next thought, there's a moment where something else is possible.

Something quieter than a story. Something that doesn't need explaining. Something that just is.

I'm still working on it. Still mostly getting it wrong. Still choosing "Fine, thanks" when honest would be better, when seeing would be kinder, when the pause would reveal something worth pausing for.

But I'm noticing more. Catching myself more. And maybe that's enough for now. Maybe that's the mathematics: each moment of noticing makes the next moment of noticing slightly more likely. Each time you catch yourself in the story makes it slightly easier to remember that it's a story.

Not easier to stop telling it. We can't stop telling it. But easier to hold it lightly. To remember there's something beneath it. Something that doesn't need the narrative. Something that just sees, and in seeing, loves.¹⁸

The kale ended up going bad, by the way.

¹ This is a specific kind of hell that happens when you're trying to sound professional but also friendly but also competent but also not-too-formal and you end up spending forty-five minutes on a three-sentence email and hating yourself the entire time. No solutions here, just solidarity. ↩︎

² The productivity guilt is itself a story. Notice how it creeps in there? "I should be doing something more productive" assumes there's a correct thing to be doing and that thinking about grocery store interactions isn't it. But who decided that? And why do I believe them? ↩︎

³ There's a whole neuroscience literature on this involving the default mode network and how it's basically the part of your brain that won't shut up. The DMN is what's running when you're not actively focused on a task, which is most of the time, which means most of the time your brain is just generating narrative about itself to itself. Fun stuff. ↩︎

⁴ This is harder than it sounds. Try it. Try having a thought and then telling yourself "I didn't cause that." Your brain will immediately insist that yes, you did, it's YOUR thought, you're thinking it right now. The idea that thoughts might be more like weather than choices feels threatening somehow. ↩︎

⁵ Your narrative identity is basically the autobiography you're constantly writing in your head, except you're both the author and the main character and also the only reader, and you keep revising it retroactively to make better sense, which means your memory of yesterday is already a story you're telling yourself about yesterday rather than yesterday itself. It's stories all the way down. ↩︎

⁶ At some point you hit the philosophical bedrock of "I think therefore I am," which is comforting if you find it comforting to be certain you exist but less comforting if you start wondering what the "I" is that's doing the thinking. Descartes stopped asking questions at a convenient place, is what I'm saying. ↩︎

⁷ This is where the math metaphor breaks down, because in actual math when you solve for a different variable you get a clean answer. With people you get more questions. You get their whole deal. You get the realization that they're every bit as complicated as you are, which is somehow both obvious and impossible to really grasp. ↩︎

⁸ This kind of knowing is sometimes called embodied knowing, or somatic knowing, or other terms that all basically point at the same thing: understanding that lives in your body rather than your conscious mind. Like how you don't think about how to walk, you just walk. Except harder because walking is automatic and these deeper truths require you to somehow unautomatic something that feels very fundamental. ↩︎

⁹ Some philosophers and meditation teachers will tell you this is the whole point, that recognizing the impossibility of this is itself enlightenment or whatever. I remain skeptical but also can't exactly argue with them because they've been thinking about this longer than I have. ↩︎

¹⁰ Paley wrote very few stories over her lifetime (forty-five total), but what she did write has this quality of being so attentive to the ordinary that the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Not in a "everything is amazing" way but in a "everything is exactly as worth noticing as it actually is, which is quite remarkable if you look" way. ↩︎

¹¹ Though I should note that I'm not even sure what the kind response would've been. "Actually I'm kind of a mess today but thanks for asking" feels like it would've burdened her with more than was fair. Maybe the kind thing was to lie? I genuinely don't know. Kindness isn't a formula. It's a practice of paying attention and then responding to what you've seen. ↩︎

¹² Saunders has written about how the stories we tell about ourselves, both individually and collectively, can be exploited and weaponized, which is a whole terrifying thing I don't have room to get into here but is worth thinking about. The same narrative-making capacity that gives us identity can be hijacked to make us do things or believe things that don't serve us. Advertising is basically just applied story-engineering. ↩︎

¹³ This is where the meditation people start talking about "pure awareness" or "consciousness without content" or other phrases that sound vaguely mystical but might just be pointing at something real that we don't have good language for. The experience of being aware without being aware OF anything in particular. Just... awareness, aware of itself. It's weird. ↩︎

¹⁴ This has to do with shutting down (or at least quieting) the default mode network, which is the brain's story-making machinery. When the DMN is running full-blast you're narrating your experience. When it quiets down you're just having your experience. Both modes have their uses. We get in trouble when we can't access the second one at all. ↩︎

¹⁵ Confusion as a spiritual practice sounds like it should be easier than it is. Turns out our brains really, really want certainty. Want to know. Want to have the story make sense. Choosing to remain confused, to stay in the not-knowing, goes against some pretty deep programming. ↩︎

¹⁶ This is what Saunders calls "unselfing," which is maybe too dramatic a term but does capture something true about the experience. It's not that you stop being you. You just stop being so convinced you're you. Stop gripping the identity quite so tightly. ↩︎

¹⁷ Some contemplative traditions talk about building up something they call "witness consciousness," which is the part of you that can watch yourself being you without getting completely absorbed in the drama. This seems useful if you can actually do it, which I mostly can't, but the moments when I catch myself being myself (if that makes any sense) are the moments when I have the most freedom to choose a response rather than just executing programming. ↩︎

¹⁸ I'm not sure I actually believe this last line. It sounds good. It might be true. But it might also just be another story I'm telling myself, another way of making meaning out of something that doesn't need meaning made out of it. I'm leaving it in because the uncertainty feels honest. Sometimes you have to write toward what you hope is true and see if it becomes true by being written. ↩︎