Kindness, Differently (#42)
Knowing When To Step In And When To Step Back
Hello 🔵⚪️🔴
Our Chinese New Year holidays were meant to be a family trip. Life, as it sometimes does, had other plans. One of our children needed to stay home, and so we reconsidered - together, as a family - and redistributed ourselves accordingly. What followed for me was a week spent one on one with my teenage son.
I am glad it unfolded this way. Not because it was easy, or because anything was resolved. The equilibrium that an anxious mind needs - to stay focused, to keep moving without tipping into paralysis or overwhelm - is a fragile thing, you never fully nail it. But during that week, I felt how it could be done.
It was during those quiet days that I came across a definition of kindness that stopped me. We tend to think of kindness as giving - more attention, more help. Jonathan Lear, in Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life, offers something quieter yet more demanding: kindness as discernment.
“A kind person will have a distinctive sensitivity to the world - and a special sort of motivation to act. To be truly kind, one needs to be able to distinguish a situation in which one ought to step in and help someone who is struggling, from a superficially similar situation in which one should step back and allow the struggling person to develop the requisite skills and sense of autonomy. A kind person will be sensitive to that difference - and in noticing that difference will thereby be motivated to act in the appropriate ways.”
That week became a living exercise in exactly this. Carefully sensing when to encourage, when to be demanding, when to simply be nearby and say nothing. My first instinct was always to do more. Non-action felt like something wrong, like a small failure of care. And yet I kept noticing that presence - gentle, unhurried, without agenda - was sometimes more valuable than any action I could have taken. Part of that presence was simply maintaining rhythm & structure. The similar meals, the same small rituals of the day. For an anxious mind, routine is not monotony — it is a kind of shelter. None of this felt like wisdom in the moment. It felt more like an instinctive sense of which moment required action and which required stillness.
This same kindness shows up in professional life. Leading a team well is not only about vision or decisions. It is also about discerning when to step in and when to step back. It’s also about building a structure & rhythm for shared knowledge and regular interactions - light enough that people barely feel it, but steady enough that they can move freely within it. It’s a form of kindness that rarely gets named as such.
There is a musical image I have kept returning to during that quiet week. In a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing Schubert’s Impromptu #3, what strikes you first is his posture - his fingers barely lifting from the keys, the gesture almost imperceptible. And yet what comes through is so beautiful, calming, almost divine. The emotion, the movement, the contrasts, - all of it emerging from what looks, visually, like almost nothing.
Kindness, at its most precise, works the same way.
Happy Friday 🔵⚪️🔴 whatever day of the week it is
Arina