Day 2 of the community trinity. Getting old is sort of a race were every competitor you pass is dead. People we love and care about just endlessly trickle away with we winners feeling both more lucky, more lonely, and more doomed. I’m often surprised when the death of some celebrity far removed from me happens to particularly move me. I couldn’t tell you whose death among folks I know or admire would be most unsettling to me, I only find out when it happens. My amygdala’s decision to choke me up for some but not others is always a mystery to me.
The caring impulses we have evolved shift complexly around the intersection of the axes of empathy, sympathy, and compassion. Stepping into another’s shoes is a pretty straightforward path to empathy, but those shoes need to fit in some way and we need to recognize ourselves in them. An exterminator hired by my landlord left some glue traps for roaches in my kitchen, and as much as I have washed them down the drain them without any qualms in the past, to see them stuck there with antennae waving for days is freaking me out. I want to put then out of their misery, but the exterminator is using them to quantity the infestation, so asked me to leave them alone. If their tiny anguish gets to be too much for me, I may just squish them anyway. Though I have always apologized for destroying their little lives.
I wonder if our hearts could even contain the empathy we might feel for all the suffering in world; the grief and fear would surely be overwhelming, perhaps enraging us with rampaging anger. We build rings of empathy spreading out from ourselves which weaken as the subjects grow more remote and alien. Compassion, on the other hand seems to strengthen as those rings expand. I feel compassion for all living things not just the cute or unthreatening ones that I can feel empathy for. While there is that axis of empathy in this, more than that, this compassion does not need me to feel with them, it is a much more a philosophical and intellectual stance which can be cultivated in the absence of any particular subject and without regard for their worthiness. As we recognize and accept the existence of suffering among our distant relations, we can take on some responsibility for it, and apply it more broadly. It’s not just a gut reaction to imagining of our own suffering as it is with empathy, it’s an acknowledgment of the value of reducing suffering, and acceptance of a duty to engage with it.
This Holly Days, lets try to look at those whose shoes won’t fit us, and remember that we are all, every boy, girl, bird, and bug, literally cousins. We share a planet and a mysterious spark of life with its curse of desire and suffering, which if yours matters, so should theirs.
HOLLY DAYS 