“Nice” gets a bad rap. Perhaps the harshest thing I’ve heard said about it is “If you can’t be interesting, be nice.”
But that’s a false dichotomy — a close neighbour to the awful, awful notion that you need to be a tortured soul to be creative.
I saw the best refutation of that the other night when Craig and I watched the brilliant Hannah Gadsby: Nanette — a stand-up comedy routine that suddenly transforms mid-way into a transformative, game-changing piece of non-fiction theatre.
Back to nice: Is there any quality the world is missing right now more than nice? Niceness doesn’t even require empathy; it just demands that you get over yourself enough to think for a second about the person in front of you.
Why? Just because! Because that’s the right thing to do — and if we all made the effort to do it, the world would be a much better, more functional place.
So thank you, Mom, for the gift of nice that you embedded into my personality — even if there are lapses in my considerateness like this one. I think so many of the advantages I’ve enjoyed in life are simply because I have a conscience about other people.
There are also many things I like about you that are just intrinsically you, and aren’t about me!