On kindness
I woke up sweating. Not the typical 50-year-old-perimenopausal-woman sweats, nor the expected "it's a summer heat wave" sweats, but the "is my air conditioner working" sweats. And sure enough, my 1905 Victorian and its insufficient central HVAC system was, in fact, not working—in the middle of the 2026 heat wave, at the exact moment I happened to be a 50-year-old woman in perimenopause.
To say I was miserable would be an understatement. It was suffocating. I couldn't cool my house below 85 degrees, and outside regularly topped 105 and never dropped below 83. I was in a constant state of uncomfortable, undignified, insufferable.
I kept my one window unit in my bedroom on full blast with the door closed, trying to maintain a single sanctuary in the house. The two fans I owned went to the living room where my bunnies live, who don't do well in temperatures above 77. Between the three of us, I'm not sure who suffered the worst of it. Probably my two little companions—they don't sweat, which means they can't cool themselves.
So I texted my next door neighbor, Mona, to ask if she had a fan.
That was the whole ask. One fan.
She brought three—portable, rechargeable, the kind I kept carrying from room to room like a small hopeful parade. Those, plus two dehumidifiers I bought, got me down to 79. Then she brought over individual fans I could angle at myself while I reattached the garbage disposal that had decided to come undone. Then she noticed me struggling to install a large window unit in a first-floor room and sent her gardener over before the unit and I both went toppling over the sill.
I want to be precise about that last one, because it's the part that matters: I didn't ask. She saw.
She got me through this. Without her, I'm not sure I would have survived it—at least not as well. And this is layered onto countless other returned favors she and other neighbors and I bestow on each other regularly. Pet sitting. Collecting packages. Taking care of the feral cats. Feeding the birds. Helping out in each other's yards. Playing backyard games.
I chose this lovely house, insufficient air conditioning and all. I didn't choose my neighbors. They came with the purchase. There's no guarantee—the block is a lottery, and some people lose it. I won. And then we built something: we look out for each other. We enjoy each other's company. We take care of each other.
Kindness isn't luck. It's practice. Yoga sutra 1.33—maitrī karuṇā muditā upekṣāṇāṁ—is about cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion toward the suffering, gladness toward the virtuous, equanimity toward the non-virtuous. My neighbors do this for each other. Especially of late, in our suffering, offering compassion in the sharing of fans, of gardeners, of what’s available to help.
The morning after the house finally settled at 73 degrees, I went out for my walk. I was on the phone with my mom. I made it about a block.
A neighbor was standing by the side of the of his house, not moving, looking at an empty space where his exterior wall had been just hours earlier. The air smelled like smoke.
I hung up.
I don't have anything obvious to offer a man whose house has burned. Nobody's fire is solved by a rechargeable fan. But I have a dear friend whose house burned down a few years ago. Thankfully, he’s on the other side of it and knows things I will never know. So that's what I have. I can hand my neighbor a contact who’s been through what he’s going through now.
That's the whole economy of a block, it turns out. You don't give people what you have. You give them what you happen to have that they need right now, which is almost never the thing you'd have guessed.
“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
Henry James said it three times. I always read that as emphasis. I don't anymore. I think he said it three times because that's what it takes—kindness isn't a thing you realize, it's a thing you do, and then do again, and then do again, until it's just the way the block works.
Tonight my house will be 73 degrees. I'll leave the bedroom door open for the first time in weeks. The bunnies will stretch out flat on the floorboards, finally, ridiculously comfortable.
None of that coolness is mine. It’s Mona’s. It started with one text for help.
I woke up sweating. I'll go to bed cool. And a block away, someone is standing in the smoke, and now it's my turn.