The Trouble with Compassion

By Jessica Shepherd

A robin sings into the gathering dark of an Alaskan evening. It’s early May and light enough now, the birds carry on until nearly midnight. The husband is off to a conference in Girdwood, the dogs are asleep on the couch behind me, and the room has settled into a rare stillness.

A little before midnight ~ Photo by Jessica Shepherd

I’m doing my best to find the balance between following all the political fuckery, and making time for moments of grace so as to not entirely lose faith in humanity.

Every day I wake up and wonder what new failure awaits us. Today, it was this quote:

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

~ Elon Musk

***

I spent the afternoon with my 10-year-old granddaughter. We drove to Bay Crest Greenhouse, bought two flats of spring starts, then came home and planted snapdragons and pansies in a hanging basket. Turns out, she’s an expert on Santa’s reindeer. Did I know they’re all females and have antlers? I did not. At the same time, her body is rapidly budding toward womanhood. The combination of such innocence and sexual awakening is worrisome. She tells me she has a crush on a sixth-grade girl.

“The one I met when I picked you up today?”

“Yes.”

The girl in question is slim, with a flow of dark hair, her family originally from India I’m guessing. Her parents voted for Trump, a fact neither girl can reconcile.

“Why do good people vote for bad men?”

I have such faith in this child, and yet I worry. She’s too ready to approach a stranger and carry on a conversation, or volunteer to help the guy next door change the oil in his car. I feel it’s my duty to stamp out that innocence, as much as it grieves me to do so.

I told her about a woman I saw lying on the side of the road here in Homer. What I saw was a tarp with a slim arm sticking out from underneath. Fingers curled in a loose fist. Cars drove past, but several women had pulled off to the shoulder and were tending to her or talking among themselves, probably waiting for an ambulance. I learned later that she was naked under that tarp. And unconscious.

“What happened to her? Did they ever find out who did that to her?”

I didn’t have answers, just a moral to the story. “That’s why we don’t want you waving to cars when you’re walking by yourself.”

Of course, there’s a harder truth, the one I didn’t tell her. We decry strangers, men foreign to us, but it’s the familiar ones we should fear.

***

Several years ago, my New Year’s resolution was to cultivate compassion. I don’t recall my motivation, but unlike most resolutions, this one stuck. Over the ensuing months and years, I found myself becoming more tender. Better able to relate to people, or just more willing to listen.

It follows that empathy allows us to see and acknowledge the suffering of others, while compassion is the desire to roll up our sleeves and do something to help. One fuels the other.

There’s a further moral to the story about the unconscious girl. The women who stopped to help, who found a tarp in their car or called the police, and stood about protectively? They felt empathy and acted with compassion.

Compassion often takes us beyond our comfort zone. Once we make that leap, we learn to see beyond appearances and first impressions. We stop and help a stranger change a flat tire. Alaskans still do that for each other. Or we hand out sandwiches and apples at the local food pantry, getting to know names and a little about the lives behind the poverty. When we leave politics and religion at the door, we almost always find shared fears and frustrations, but also, common interests. Our own lives acquire greater meaning.

But here’s the thing, a compassionate nature can make us a target for those whose need or greed is so great, they take and take, never satisfying the emotional poverty within. That may explain why some see empathy as a weakness. So, compassion requires good boundaries, and a little common sense helps too. That’s the message I want my granddaughter to learn.

A touch of mercy transforms everything. It is the most profound feeling we can have: It alters the world.

~ Pope Francis