Talks with the Mirror

Le part 15: Compassion

2020

These days I seem to be pulling inspiration from different places. I don't think it's a copyright infringement to read, or hear, something and be moved, so I think we're in the clear.

I used to listen to a lot of TED Talks when I was in high-school. I had a remarkable teacher, Mister Maddock, who found it important for our young minds to be exposed to these people who all believed in something so much that they would go up on a stage and perform a twenty-minute speech that took them about six to nine months to prepare for. We heard talks about everything, and with each passing talk our minds were slightly warmer to new ideas, engaged and wanting.

Somewhere along the way, I fell off the habit of listening. The teenager in me wanted to tell. Hence why I started writing so much, all kinds of things. Fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, poetry. But, as I felt that my work was coming from the same voice and same view all the time, I decided to see if there's more growing to do. Of course there is! I took back to books and back to TED Talks, and the inspiration has been flowing like never before.

Today I watched the Ted Talk of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called The Danger of a Single Story. The main thing I drew from the talk is that there is something very wrong with people only knowing about one side of a story. Be it the story of a country, a person, a community. Because these stereotypes we allow others to make are the ones used to box these same countries, people, and communities, into a single thing which they may well not be. Or at least they aren't ONLY that.

Take Africa for example, everyone uses it as the picture for poverty and failed everything. Your life is hard? Well, remember there is Africa! Somehow that is supposed to make someone feel better about their drunk father. 

I think that the single story gets in the way of compassion. After all, we are picking the thing that makes them different from us, and letting it define them. No mind is payed to what they could be because a single story is apparently all you need.

We can only have compassion for one another if we are told the entire story, all the faces of everything. Then we can truly understand and feel what the others feel. Because seeing all the different ways in which something is created also ends up revealing that we aren't all that different after all.

Telling us Africa is poor creates pity, not compassion; saying Russia is coming for us creates fear, not compassion; showing Hawaii as a fun place to vacation in makes them into a service, not a people we can be compassionate with.

What's so bad about having pity for Africa? Doesn't that make white people donate money to organizations to help them? 

Donating is a great gesture, there is no one complaining about that. My issue is the reason behind why we donate. 

We are shown videos of a people being miserable, and we feel bad for them because we feel that we are better than them. We pity how far from our level they are. As long as we see their sad story and suffering, we will keep donating so it gets a little bit less worse. The money will keep going in, but nothing will change. Someone we pity is someone we give just enough help so that they aren't dying in their situation. 

How does compassion differ?

When we force ourselves to get to know all sides about a sad story: how it started, who it affects, who it doesn't, the personal experiences of real people, the ones controlling the negative side; then we can begin to truly see it for what it is. Then we can put ourselves in their shoes, and cry their tears, and not only feel like donating so they can hold through the poverty, but actually do something so they are pulled out of it.

That's the difference: pity gives you the money so you don't starve in poverty, compassion gives you the help you need to have a fresh start.

Until we start to feel compassionate for those we want to help, compassionate for those we hate, compassionate for those we treat as servants, we will never be able to be a united people. By united, I don't mean living in the same place or same 'level'. United means at the same place of heart where we know that having humanity in common is all we need. We cannot be that different, that unapproachable, that untouchable, if we know that at the core of it all our greatest similarity cannot be taken away from us.

I feel what you feel, just in a different body. I come from what you come from, just in a different place. I crave for the things you crave, just in a different field of opportunity. But if that field is so heavily uneven I won't simply help you make it through the flood by giving you a raft. I will be right there rowing with you until you are safe.

That's compassion.