Sea Change
A decade ago I set out to write about compassion. In our increasingly connected world, I believed compassion was going to be very important if we wanted to preserve human creativity, health, and prosperity. So I decided to write about that.
I wasn’t up to it.
I discovered that I didn’t know much about compassion. And I was very disappointed to find that I really wasn’t very good at it.
Every human being has an innate gift for compassion, me included, but I had never tried to work much with it. Confidence, irrational certainty, and various civilized forms of aggression were the tools I picked up most often to address a problem of any kind.
Until I began this project I hadn’t noticed that I was like that. I just figured I was a really compassionate person who was forced, by circumstance, to be kind of an asshole once in a while. People who knew me seemed to think that, too.
Habitually, I believed that my intellect, my healthy habits, and my virtuous views—in a word, my superiority—would provide some kind of safety. But in that arrogant cocoon I was cut off from others, especially those who were suffering. That separation was intentional. Not conscious, but intentional. I unconsciously worked to preserve my sense of security. I quietly avoided coming into direct contact with suffering people, especially if that encounter might reveal the obvious fact that I wasn’t safe at all, that I was very much like anyone else, vulnerable to all the human pain the world has to offer.
And in my various, illusory states of psychological refuge the muscles of my compassion were gradually atrophying.
Suffering Finds Us
To offer authentic compassion to others, we may first need to acknowledge our own vulnerability, and our experience of suffering. Our own suffering helps us build empathy for others, and empathy provides the musculature of compassion. We exercise those muscles by acknowledging our vulnerability and experiencing our own pain as fully as we can.
This is not to say we should seek to experience suffering. No need. We
