We all could use a little more compassion. On both the giving and receiving ends. After watching ‘Beasts Of The Southern Wild’ I am reminded of how wrong we get this and how often we get it wrong.
I often am caught up in my own issues/dilemma/crisis and fail to see others as they are. I see them through my own lens. Too many of us think we are doing something good for someone else when all we are doing is overlaying our own ‘stuff’ on someone else’s situation. We then call it ‘pain’, ‘happiness’, ‘coping’, or whatever we know it to be in our own world. I am as guilty as the next. And then comes judgment.
That person/those people are not acting as they ‘should’. Notice all the quotes? Compassion is about allowing someone else to be in their pain and respecting that pain. It is not about telling or suggesting or even thinking someone else should live/act/respond they way we would. It’s the age old adage…….’walk in my shoes’. It just might not be what we think they are feeling for them.
I set up this blog to write about self discovery and learning how to ‘be me’. Respecting that others can live in worlds that bring more or less pain than I live in, more or less wealth than I live in, or simply have a different view than I have means I can understand more about the in depth nature of being human. We work with what we have. Respect comes in many forms. Compassion is a piece. And when given without respect it is no longer compassion. And I hold open that I misnamed this blog. Maybe it should be called ‘Respect’. But that word has been so over-used I dread the minefields of misunderstanding. And lack of compassion.