As graduation season comes to a close, I’ll admit I have a soft spot for commencement speeches. There is something charming about the whole enterprise. Every spring, universities invite an accomplished person to stand in front of thousands of young people and attempt the impossible task of distilling a lifetime of wisdom into twenty minutes.

I’ll also admit that I probably won’t miss this year’s crop of speeches that were less inspiring than usual. Instead of memorable advice, many ceremonies generated news because students booed speakers who dared mention artificial intelligence. These might have made for good headlines, but I miss the speeches that aimed a little higher.

I miss Steve Jobs telling Stanford graduates that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” I miss Matthew McConaughey advising students that happiness is not the same thing as joy, and that chasing the former often gets in the way of finding the latter. And I miss Jerry Seinfeld, who’s speech at Duke I happened to see in person, giving more lighthearted guidance: “Do not lose your sense of humor. Not enough of life makes sense for you to survive without it.” Whether you agreed with them or not, those speeches were trying to answer the biggest questions: How should we live? What matters? What will we regret?

One of my favorites came from author George Saunders at Syracuse University in 2013. Saunders began with a familiar commencement premise: an older person reflecting on a life filled with mistakes. He talked about embarrassing moments, bad jobs, and various youthful misadventures. Then he surprised everyone. The thing he regretted most wasn’t a career decision, a financial mistake, or some missed opportunity.

It was a girl.

When Saunders was in seventh grade, a shy new student arrived at his school. She was awkward, frequently teased, and painfully lonely. Saunders wasn’t cruel to her. He never joined in the bullying. Occasionally, he even defended her. But he didn’t do enough. Years later, what haunted him wasn’t anything he had done. It was what he hadn’t done.

“What I regret most in my life,” he told the graduates, “are failures of kindness.”

Not acts of cruelty. Failures of kindness. The distinction is important. Most of us can think of moments when we weren’t our best selves. Saunders was talking about something more subtle. He was talking about those times when another person was suffering right in front of us and we responded, in his words, “sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” We saw the need and chose not to fully engage.

Then Saunders asked a question that has stuck with me ever since I first heard this speech: “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?”

It’s a question that feels especially relevant today. We live in a culture obsessed with achievement. We tell graduates to dream big, work hard, change the world, build companies, make money, find success.  To be clear, I’m not against any of those things and Saunders wasn’t either. His point was simply that, when we look back on our lives, our deepest regrets may not be about ambition at all.

They may be about people.

Maybe we can / Find a place to feel good / And we can treat people with kindness “

– Harry Styles, “Treat People with Kindness”

Which brings me to The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O’Connor’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 1962. At first glance, it seems like an odd companion to a graduation speech. Commencement addresses are usually delivered to people standing at the beginning of their adult lives, full of ambition and possibility. The Edge of Sadness is about people who have already lived most of theirs.

O’Connor’s novel follows Father Hugh Kennedy, a middle-aged Catholic priest returning to his old Boston parish after years away. Once considered a rising star in the Church, Kennedy has spent time recovering from alcoholism and carries more than his share of disappointments, doubts, and regrets. If graduation speeches ask, “What kind of life should I build?” The Edge of Sadness asks a different question: “What happens when the life you built doesn’t quite turn out the way you imagined?”

Back in Boston, Kennedy reconnects with the Carmody family, wealthy Irish Catholics he has known for years. On the surface, they seem successful and enviable. But beneath that polished exterior are broken relationships, loneliness, addiction, resentment, and grief. As Kennedy becomes entangled in their lives, he finds himself serving less as a traditional priest and more as a witness to the quiet suffering that people carry behind closed doors.

What struck me most about the book was how ordinary the sources of suffering are. Nobody sets out to hurt anyone. Instead, the damage comes from smaller failures. People withdraw when they should engage. They protect themselves when they should be vulnerable. They hold back words that should be spoken. They choose pride over understanding. Again and again, people fail to fully show up for one another.

Which brings us back to George Saunders. When Saunders talks about his regret over the lonely girl in seventh grade, he is careful to point out that he wasn’t mean to her. His regret is that he wasn’t kinder.

That same idea runs throughout The Edge of Sadness. The characters aren’t suffering because they were surrounded by evil people. They are suffering because they were surrounded by ordinary people. People who were busy, distracted, frightened, proud, wounded, ambitious, or uncertain. In other words, people very much like the rest of us. While Saunders asks his audience, “What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?”, O’Connor spends an entire novel exploring the consequences of that question.

One of the most hopeful aspects of both the speech and the novel is that neither views kindness as some grand heroic act. Saunders isn’t urging graduates to solve world hunger. Father Kennedy isn’t performing miracles. Both are talking about something smaller and, therefore, more difficult: paying attention to the people directly in front of us. Noticing loneliness. Extending grace. Choosing compassion over judgment. Making the extra phone call. Asking the follow-up question. Staying in the conversation a little longer.

You’ve got to try a little kindness / Yes, show a little kindness / Just shine your light for everyone to see“

– Glen Campbell, “Try a Little Kindness”

As I was thinking about Saunders’s speech, I found myself returning to a story I told a few months ago in my post about The Reivers and a Super 8 movie called The Meat Eater that I had made when I was twelve years old with two friends, Jamie and Dave. The movie itself was ridiculous. Dave played a serial killer. Jamie played a detective. I played the victim. Repeatedly. There was ketchup, hamburger meat, and an alarming lack of adult supervision. But the story ended up being about something else.

I also mentioned that after my mother died between seventh and eighth grade, Jamie was unusually kind to me. Nothing dramatic. No grand gesture. He simply spent time with me during a period when I needed friends more than I probably understood. Decades later, I still remember it. When Jamie and I reconnected last year and I mentioned it to him, he seemed genuinely surprised. He barely remembered it happening.

A few months later, on a whim, I tracked down Dave. The last time I had seen him was when we were teenagers. After freshman year of high school, he and his mother moved to San Diego, and like so many friendships in the pre-internet era, ours simply disappeared. Today, if someone moves away, you still see photos of their vacations, their kids, and their lunch choices. Back then, when someone left, they were simply gone. You had no idea what happened to them. They just vanished into the static.

Somehow, through a remarkably lucky Google search, I discovered that Dave lived less than a mile from me. Last week, we met for dinner and spent the evening laughing about The Meat Eater, filling in gaps in each other’s memories, and marveling at the strange paths our lives had taken.

And, echoing the conversation I had with Jamie, during our dinner, Dave told me something I had completely forgotten. Toward the end of junior high, his parents divorced and this had been much harder on him than I ever knew. He told me that one of the things that helped him through that difficult period was our group of friends.

“We had so much fun,” he said.

He said that giving up that friend group was the hardest thing about the move to San Diego. Then he told me something even more surprising. After moving away, he continued having dreams about us well into his thirties. I was stunned.

For Dave, our little group of friends wasn’t just a collection of kids riding bikes, making bad horror films and wasting summer afternoons. It was a refuge during one of the most difficult periods of his young life. The memories stayed with him for decades.

I had no memory of any of that. Just as Jamie didn’t remember being kind to me, I didn’t remember being there for Dave. And that’s the part of George Saunders’s speech that feels truer to me every year.

Kindness don’t ask for much / But an open mind / Kindness can cure a broken heart / Honey, are you feelin’ kind?”

– Ryan Adams, “Kindness”

When Saunders talks about kindness, he’s not describing grand acts of heroism. He’s talking about the small opportunities that present themselves in ordinary life. The lonely kid sitting by herself. The friend whose mother has died. The classmate whose family is falling apart. The person standing quietly at the edge of the group. Most of the time we don’t know which moments matter.

In my conversation with Jamie, I learned that afternoons spent playing with my dad’s early home computer helped spark an interest that eventually led him into the tech industry. In my conversation with Dave, I learned that friendships I had largely forgotten became some of the most cherished memories of his childhood. And in both cases, the people involved remembered those moments far more clearly than I did. Which is perhaps the most beautiful thing about kindness. The effects can last far longer than our memory of giving it.

George Saunders told a group of graduates that his greatest regrets were failures of kindness. More than a decade later, I think the inverse may be true as well. Some of the most meaningful things we ever do may be acts of kindness so small that we don’t even remember them.

The world spends a lot of time telling graduates to think about their future. Their career. Their success. Their ambitions. That’s understandable. But George Saunders and Edwin O’Connor remind us that when we eventually look back on our lives, what we remember most vividly may not be our accomplishments at all.

It may be the people. The friend who showed up. The person who made us feel less alone. The afternoon that seemed ordinary at the time. The kindness that neither person realized would matter for the next forty years.

You may be creating one of their favorite memories without even realizing it.