Making kindness our hallmark

Abstract

Those who correspond with me directly may notice a few quotes beneath my contact details in my email signature. The words I took time to include there mean a great deal to me. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dorothy Day are among those represented. The quotations from their works talk about kindness, time, and being. Their words are among those by which I strive to act each day. As this New Year 2024 stretches before us, I'd like to share their words with you as I reflect on how fundamental kindness is to what we aim to achieve as nurses, scholars, and most importantly—human beings.

Emerson and Day are individuals separated by time whose words are complementary to one another in important respects. Emerson was a 19th century essayist, poet, and philosopher (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emerson/). He said, “You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” Day was a 20th century journalist and activist (https://catholicworker.org/life-and-spirituality-dorothy-day/). She wrote “We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities of faith as well—and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope our lives will mean something to people who won't be alive until centuries from now. It's a “great chain of being” … I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain, doing our best to keep that chain connected, unbroken.” I sometimes pause amid a workday just to take in the signification of Emerson's and Day's words today.

Read together, Emerson's and Day's words speak to me as a person and as a nurse. They say to me that kindness allows us to transcend the travails of daily life. That transcendence comes in remembering that, in our fleetingly short lives, other people matter most. Kindness recalls us to our precious shared humanity, despite trying circumstances. In any given moment, being kind reinforces the value of our personhood within that shared humanity. We are each individual people in our own right and universally human at the same time. Every one of us needs and craves kindness. We recoil when kindness is absent and are too often surprised when we encounter it. One of my fondest hopes is that kindness becomes so commonplace that we revel in it surrounding us instead of being surprised by it.

Kindness is many things, things that surpass our many differences. Kindness is gratitude, thanks, and simple communion with another human being. Kindness is honesty, offered with empathy and consideration for the other. My experience shows me that kindness commonly means most in small gestures. The pace of our lives as people, professionals, and scholars typically presses us to forgo the small gesture. Think of how often you leave an encounter without ever hearing “how are you?” or receive email messages devoid of a salutation, a farewell, or both. Conversely, consider the last time a genuine compliment or query about how you were faring startled you out of the mire that comes of workaday pressures. The resultant warm feeling or fleeting smile represent more than we might muster into words. Kindness greatly matters to each of us.

I realise that, by this point, you might be thinking what, Sarah, does kindness have to do with nursing and a gerontological nursing research journal? Humanity and personhood figure widely and persistently in our discipline, profession, and specialty. Kindness recognises both humanity and personhood, speaking to our universality and our diversity and bolstering wellbeing. As nurses, we aim to support health and, I would add, function and wellbeing in our focus on older people and their daily lives. We reify environment in that aim, emphasising interaction with other beings and objects. Our inherently relational and interactionist approach underscores that kindness is integral to nursing wherever we express it—as clinician, educator, researcher, policy maker, administrator, activist, and beyond.

Too frequently, kindness is sidestepped in favour of things that feel easier or expedient, more sophisticated, or even powerful. The sentiment that lies beneath whatever is chosen when kindness is overlooked or dismissed may feel hurtful to the person who had simply hoped for kindness and an answer. We've all seen this in our clinical practice. The relief written on the face of the person who was kindly and honestly told the truth of a diagnosis or prognosis, despite the notion of “bad news” that lies in that truth. Their paradoxical relief in that kindness stays with us all as we recall comforting them. Each of us as nurse scholars and scientists, along with our colleagues from other disciplines, has and will again face something we characterise as bad news. Even if it is simply not the answer we wanted in response to a manuscript or grant submission, such news will come to us again and again across the arc of our careers and our lives. Keeping our clinical and scholarly experiences in mind, we can choose kindness with the knowledge of the difference we make for others and for ourselves as we do.

The choice of kindness imbues every interaction with human grace. Famously, introducing ourselves unless we are certain that the other person knows us is a wonderful place to start. The late Dr. Kate Granger MBE, a British geriatrician, reminded us of the power that lies in the profoundly kind statement “hello, my name is…”. That simple and powerfully kind gesture lives on in Dr. Granger's and her husband's global campaign Hello, My Name Is (https://www.hellomynameis.org.uk) to have us all do the same in each and every healthcare encounter. Kindness is as simple as that introduction, asking after the person with whom we start a conversation, and including a salutation and a closing in an email just as we would in a handwritten letter.

Kindness in scientific publishing deserves special attention, not because it is more complex or esoteric than everyday kindness but because it is so easy to forget. Many aspects of scientific publishing exist at arm's length. Much of the process is automated through platforms driven by large publishing companies which frequently seem impersonal. Moreover, in journals like this one, authors and reviewers are anonymous to one another. Many communications are driven by templates, leaving the recipient to wonder ‘did a real person send this to me or was it just released by some algorithm. All the platforms, algorithms, and templates can pile up to feel anything but kind.

Here at the International Journal of Older People Nursing, the editorial team members all recognise publishing can feel impersonal and unkind. That's what makes us strive for kindness. Amidst all the time pressures and difficult choices, we want to be kind in our relationships with those whom we number as members of our IJOPN community and beyond. We spend time considering the needs and wishes of our authors, readers, and reviewers. Some of us first met through this journal, reminding us of how personal it can be. While I know associate editor G.J. Melendez-Torres and social media editors Emma Blakey and Ellen Munsterman through other venues, I would never have met or got to work with associate editor Jennifer Baumbusch or social media editors Jed Montayre or Tope Omisore were it not for their or interest in and service to IJOPN. I count myself lucky to work with them all. We are all fortunate to work with the team at Wiley, which publish the journal, whose careful attention and hard work make the journal a reality with each new issue.

As the IJOPN editorial team, we all aim for kind and honest communication as a hallmark of our journal. Our kindness helps us balance interests that are sometimes divergent. IJOPN's dedicated editorial assistant Sunmathi Devadas and I love to hear from authors. We take pains to be kind to current and prospective authors when they write to us, especially when our message is one that we imagine they do not wish to receive. Likewise, G.J., Jennifer, Sunmathi, and I relish hearing from reviewers. Reviewers are a group precious to any journal as all authors who have waited patiently for a decision on a manuscript might imagine. Reviewers' requests of us are most often for more time. We are happy to offer that time, even knowing that an author might wait longer for a decision as a result. We do the same for authors who write for an extension or ask about submitting a revised manuscript even after a deadline has lapsed. The answer is always yes.

We at IJOPN wish everyone in our journal's community and beyond a New Year filled with safety, health, function, dignity, and peace. We hope that what we do here echoes across the many roles and spaces in which all of us live our lives, aiming to heal and support individuals, families, communities, and our fragile planet.

gerontological nursing, ‘Hello, My Name Is…’, kindness, nursing, peer review, writing for publication.