(This is the third part of a series on compassion. To read the first part, click here, and to read the second, click here.)
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.– Bishop Desmond Tutu
Another thing I have found to be true is that a few people feel a similar dissatisfaction with what compassion means to my own.
Sara Turner’s article equates compassion with pity.
At one point, she says, “Now, I can’t dispute the actual definition but I thought that compassion meant a little more.”
My question to her is this – what if you could dispute it?
What if you could definitively say that compassion is something different?
In the walk that I took with my teammate, Kathryn, we talked about compassion not just encompassing the suffering end of the spectrum.
For me, that begs the question – if compassion is having sympathy for a person’s suffering AND the desire to do something to end that suffering, then what do you call having excitement for another person’s deepest joy AND the desire to do something to continue that joy?
Does that count as compassion, or is it something else entirely?
I know that just as much as my hearts breaks for and yearns to help the man who is rolling around a festival on a skateboard with his hands because he has no legs and begging for money, my heart gets excited for and I cannot help but be excited with my teammate or friend or family member who is just about to jump out their skin because of something amazing that has just happened.But does my teammate need me to be excited, too?
Or am I projecting that need on them out of my own need for people to be excited with me?
And are the two situations opposite ends of the same spectrum, or two different spectrums entirely?
I realize I am raising more questions than I have answers for this time around, and I wish I had some kind of concrete answer.
I like absolute answers.
I like things to make sense, to know what the rules and guidelines are.
It frustrates me to no end to not have a solid conclusion-
And even more so to realize that it will probably take its sweet time in revealing itself (like most other things I have learned in the last nine months)…
So I plan to keep searching until either I find it, or it finds me.
