I've changed enormously, in this matter, as my life has gone on. I now have often painfully deep compassion for someone else's suffering, but when I was young I kind of "didn't get it" about someone else's pain in anything. It wasn't that I didn't care or was cold, I just didn't connect.
As I got older, I know that I consciously copied conventional expressions of sympathy to people around me in any kind of upset, but the deep-down feeling for their plight still wasn't really there fully.
It's only as I got into my thirties, and had been through the first of some losses that devastated me, that something "connected" and I was able to genuinely feel compassion for another person's sadness, difficulty, etc.
It kind of grew exponentially from there, to the point where I now very much feel compassion for people going through something.
Oddly enough, I still don't really like most of the human race, because people are capable of such cruelty to each other at every level. People are not my favorite thing. But when something awful is happening to someone, I connect to that pain and I do want to help. It's taken half a lifetime to get to feel that way though, and probably only because I've had some very hard knocks in life myself, and it made something raw in me.
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22 Nov 2013, 2:48 am
