Nice always seemed like such a lame concept."Be nice to your siblings"
"That's very nice of you" (a phrase that almost always has a but attached) ...
:It's such nice weather at the moment". "Nice girls don't" and so on and so on. It's all just so, well, nice.
I remember as a teen there was nothing worse than being described as nice. If someone said of a member of the opposite sex "You really should meet XYZ, he's so nice" you just knew that was code for ugly. In a world where physical appearance counts for everything, character in a character reference didn't just imply lacking in physical charm it screamed it.
But I've aged and matured and now come to understand that niceness is a very undervalued virtue. Indeed, wouldn't the world be a much nicer place if we could all be just a bit nicer to each other?
Having said that, a person can be too nice. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind - set boundaries, define expectations, dish out a bit of tough love on occasions. Fail to do these things, continue to ignore bad behaviour because you are too nice and you might just find yourself the victim of repeated crimes of, for instance, toilet paper theft. And trust me, finding yourself in the smallest room of the house without the loo roll, that's just not nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment