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I have been observing gentleness all around me wherever I go, talking to people about it, wondering why we hear so little about a trait that most of us value highly yet don’t seem to pay much attention to.

For the past 20 years, I have been asking students in my ethics classes to write down the names of the people who have been most influential in their lives and then to write down one character trait next to each name. In all those years, I’ve never seen the word “gentle.�

Yet, when I ask people to tell stories about gentleness, they pause. They dig deep into their memories. And then they share something profound.

Just the other day, a colleague told me about the great delight she felt when she rescued a baby swan, an action that required considerable gentleness.

A friend described meeting a woman who walks along the sidewalks of downtown Chicago every morning to find birds that have flown into the windows of tall buildings. She picks them up reverently and takes them to a place where they can be healed. Few among the hundreds of people walking by even notice her presence. They are looking at their phones, or down at their feet, or gazing off in their imaginations somewhere, preoccupied with getting to their destination.

That’s the thing about gentleness. It doesn’t proclaim itself. A gentle person can be right in our midst and rarely get noticed. Or a rough looking person can act with gentleness on occasion, but that’s not the characteristic that stands out.

The house where I grew up had a wall full of old photographs: my parents as children, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives too numerous to mention. I remember many stern faces and stiff poses.

One photograph stood out. My great-grandfather, who died the year before I was born, was shown sitting under a tree wearing a shirt and tie. His white hair was tousled, and he sported a large mustache. He looked like Mark Twain’s twin brother.

What really captured my imagination was his pose. With his right arm extended in front of him, he held a peanut between thumb and forefinger. A squirrel sat perched on his shoulder.

I would sit and stare at that photograph, wondering what kind of person my great-grandfather was. My interest was two-fold. First, I had received my middle name from him, and that conferred a kind of connection, even though I wasn’t sure what kind. Second, the image in the photo did not square with the stories I had heard of him, stories of a man who had lived a hard life as a carpenter on the North Dakota prairie, surviving a wildfire that destroyed his town, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression.

All the stories of him suggested a rough character — a fighter, a survivor — yet the photo depicted gentleness. It led me to reflect, from an early age, whether a person can be both tough and gentle.

The answer is obviously yes. We see it all the time. But for some reason we don’t seem to value gentleness enough to talk about it more often. We certainly don’t value it in leaders.

The fact that gentleness today is so often taken as a sign of weakness says more about the shallowness of our times than about the nature of gentleness. In my experience, the gentlest people are often among the strongest. They radiate an inner peace, a fierce determination to protect the most vulnerable.

You might think that a society so heavily influenced by Christianity would rank gentleness highly among the virtues. The Letter of James, after all, contains a lengthy reflection on gentleness, noting that it is a mark of wisdom.

Once that is pointed out, it seems obvious. Gentleness is a mode of being in the world. It opens a space for the presence of other people. It requires awareness of one’s surroundings and intentional focus on another’s well-being. And what is wisdom but a robust understanding of what is going on outside one’s own head? What is wisdom but a deep appreciation for the preciousness and fragility of every single life?

I think gentleness may be the most overlooked virtue in our society. And the cost of overlooking is severe. When we fail to name something, we fail to notice it. And failing to notice gentleness means that we neglect to cultivate it in ourselves and teach it to our children.

William Wordsworth's poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" contains this line: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.�

Gentleness is that flower. For the past two weeks, I’ve been haunted by thoughts too deep for tears.