Let's be real for a minute --- why perform an act of kindness? What are you getting out of it? What's the point?
That may sound a little cynical, but it's not an uncommon thought in today's world, where we're all incredibly busy and stressed and just trying to get through our own lives without making a mistake, let alone getting involved in others.
Luckily, the characters in Estelle Laure's debut YA novel THIS RAGING LIGHT --- as does her best childhood friend --- understand that there is always a point to helping others, no matter how small the kindness might seem. Read more below... Laure's post will certainly give you the warm and fuzzies this holiday season.
Laine, my dearest friend since 15, is made more of gauze and fire and water than muscle and bone. Her wavy, untamable hair, deep curves, wide, open blue eyes and sweet heart-shaped face all speak to some other world peopled by amazon bombshell nymphs.
She should probably have wings.
She probably does.
At 16, when all I could muster were hostile musings about boys and enough survival-based alertness to avoid being irreparably traumatized by the chaos around me, Laine decided to bake cheesecakes and leave them on people’s doors. She stuffed rooms with balloons and left extra money at coffee shops for the people standing behind her. She regularly filled empty parking meters and one year she bought our anti-Christmas friend a Chanukkah bush and decorated it with gifts.
She seemed to take great pleasure in making people smile, in watching as the surprise passed over them and their faces softened, in creating treasure hunts, gorgeous dinner parties, making favorite treats, buying coveted pieces of jewelry for people who thought they would never have their desires met.
She, in our teen years, gave me a purple leather bound journal with a fairy stamped on the front. I had been wanting it for ages. She also bought me my first leather jacket, which she kept on layaway for months and presented to me at Christmas, at a time when I was both broke and very cold. It’s not that she had money. She certainly didn’t have it then.
She stunned me into considering that people could do more than look out for themselves, that teenagers --- who were by right sullen and pissed at the world we were inheriting, the almost assured global destruction and general selfish crappiness of the humans in charge—we were capable of such selflessness.
She was almost difficult to watch, so bright and, I don’t know, unteenagerlike. She was a decent person, she was gorgeous, she could play soccer and climb mountains and seemed to know who she was, so steadfast in her self-knowledge that she didn’t care that the first visceral and most common reaction to her generosity was suspicion, sometimes even aversion. Because if Laine could do it, shouldn’t we all? She somehow held us to an uncomfortable, unlazy standard and we were sometimes squirmy in its grasp.
Laine is still doing what she does. These days, she makes unexpected cakes (three for my daughter’s birthday each with an initial), manipulates Styrofoam and spray paint for weeks so my kids have extraordinary Halloween costumes since I can’t so much as work a glue gun. She takes my kids when I have to leave town for work, and I come home to find art projects and a variety of baked goods, my kids happy and well cared-for.
And that is only what she does for me. That’s not taking into account her work at the local Shared Table, the meals she buys for people having hard days, the hand she is always willing to lend. She never asks for anything back. I told you. Fire and gauze and water. Or no. Maybe I’m wrong about that and she is the most of the salt of the earth, the most awake human, the best of what we can be.
As I’ve gotten older and less hostile, my kindness has filtered in my own way. I’m not the type to leave cheesecakes on doorsteps, though I do try to give often and freely, and it is (and I don’t use this world lightly) a delight to give unexpectedly. I look for need and try to fill it, and for the people I love I will do anything. But I’m not built like Laine, with the pressing, passionate desire to funnel my creativity through that relentless, unapologetic kamikaze kindness, to make kindness itself into a delicately crafted art.
I’ve been asked again and again by interviewers, always with that skeptical undertone, about whether it’s really, actually realistic that people would do as they did in my main character Lucille’s case, and take an interest in two destitute girls, help them so aggressively, in such a miraculous, angelic fashion.
I mean, do people really do that?
I’ll allow that part of THIS RAGING LIGHT is a little aspirational. I do dream of a world filled with Laines where no one walks by anyone who is hurting, where we look for occasions to be helpful, where we aren’t so cynical that we don’t see the point. Even further, where we are out to delight, to bring joy, if for no other reason than the elation it produces. It’s far from a perfect world, of course, but there is a point to kindness, and it’s up to all of us to determine what it is. With so much wrong, so much cruelty and suffering in the world it is sometimes hard to see, but there is always a point.
Estelle Laure is a Vonnegut worshiper who believes in love, magic and the power of facing hard truths. She has a BA in Theatre Arts and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and she lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her two children. THIS RAGING LIGHT, her debut novel, will be translated widely around the world.
