The first thing that struck me was that I wasn’t feeling compassion, but simply thinking about it. This alarmed me at first, but then I realized that our daily lives are flooded with scenes of human distress to the point that one becomes numb to all of it. I was thinking of compassion in terms of the mass of humanity and could not connect.
When I feel compassion, it is most often the result of recognizing that a given situation exists because of a failure to communicate, a failure to understand, a failure of strength of commitment to understand another person’s or group’s situation. The complications born from ignorance are cause for feeling compassion and sorrow over the human situation.
I associated compassion with the loss of innocence in a child. An infant comes into the world with the opportunity for a new life and a compassion born of sorrow rises up in the knowledge that this newborn soul will rapidly be overtaken by the ignorance and prejudice of its parents, society, and culture, despite everyone’s best intentions.
Compassion is the desire to relieve the suffering of others. In this sense, I noted that my life has been expressed compassionately through education. By this I mean that I have always identified strongly with the idea of bringing light to others through my writing or talks, or counsel. Thus, my sense of compassion is based on a subjective plane and not so much on the physical.
Compassion is reaching out in order to improve a condition by relieving needless suffering. Suffering here means anything that prevents the light of the soul and spirit from entering into the life of any individual. It seems to me that this can be expressed in various ways. It depends on the talents and desire of each individual.
