The school doors have opened. The last of my grandchildren to return to school was Harper. Last week we decided to celebrate this transition by heading north to practice her soccer drills, write stories, and watch movies. Her favorite movie was the new live-action Moana. Mine was The Wild Robot — an animated film based on Peter Brown’s best-selling children’s book about a robot who washes ashore on a wild island, filled with animals who think she is a monster. I would not have guessed a robot could move me, but this one did.

Roz was built to complete tasks for others. But when she arrives on that island there was no assigned job. She keeps searching for something to do that matches her programming., and when nothing surfaces, she does what we might do—she moves beyond her programming and improvises. She watches. She learns the language of the animals.

When an orphaned gosling hatches in front of her, she says the line I cannot forget–“I do not have the programming to be a mother.” And then she becomes one anyway.

We all carry programming we did not write. It can come from school, from parents, from a doctor’s office, from marriage. One of the lines I carried was this: I am a strong, independent woman. I will go to college and work.

And like Roz, I felt wholly unprepared to be a mother. At my first son’s birth I remember asking a friend, “How do you change a diaper?” I had worked so hard at being independent that I had failed to learn the skills of caring for someone else. Soon there were stacks of parenting books beside my bed. On Fridays, when I gathered with friends, I plied them with questions. What calms a crying baby? How soon can he eat solid food? Am I supposed to know this already?

I, too, had to improvise and change.

Peter Brown, who wrote the book behind the film, said the thought on his mind while writing was simply that kindness could be a survival skill. That moved me for I could see how Roz braids kindness into her strange new life. At first she was treated badly by the animals, but when the gosling becomes hers, she does her best—she names him Brightbill, she raises him, and she builds a shelter to keep them both safe. She befriends Fink, a sly and selfish fox, who learns to care about her.

When a blizzard arrives, Roz goes out into the storm and brings every animal on the island into her shelter—including the ones who called her a monster. Packed inside, the animals begin to fight and she implores them to care for one another in order to survive. Roz becomes kind not by design but because life on the island teaches her that actions of kindness work. In turn the animals take care of her.

What moved me is that Roz never stops being a robot. There is no scene where her machinery falls away and she turns human. She simply does more than she was built to do — and the doing changes her. In truth, it is in the doing that we are all changed.

Each morning I come to the café and write my way forward. Often I am asked when I will finish the book I am working on. It took me a while to understand that I have no answer for them. I am engaged in the writing because it is in the writing that I grow and change. The words on my pages are creating who I am and who I hope to become. The pages hold my answers.

The Wild Robot is not a robot story. It is a universal story. That is your story and mine. Carol Dweck spent decades showing that the beliefs we hold about our own fixedness are themselves changeable, that abilities we treat as issued to us at birth turn out to be built. Identity is not stamped on us. It is created slowly, out of what we pay attention to and who we decide to care for and become.

Kindness is a profound survival skill. I thank Roz for reminding me.