Wednesday 1/1/25
We've spoken about empathy in this journal--which itself is empathy in extended form, one could say--but I wanted to revisit the idea as the holiday season comes to a close and people make this big point of saying what they're going to do in the new year, and what others ought to do as well. It's a theoretical season of empathy--we use that word a lot during it--and a time when people declare that we must be more empathetic next year.
The truth is, very few people are empathetic in the slightest, and the they lack the ability to be empathetic, because empathy is an ability, among other things, one that must be stuck to, worked at, developed.
Writing--well, great writing--is an act of empathy. That's one of the many reasons why no one writing in the world at present--and no one within the MFA system--can produce works of actual value--human value--for humans. We often conflate the term "sympathy" with empathy, but these are very different things. Feeling bad for someone isn't the same as having empathy for them.
There are four aspects to empathy. Four parts. And they all have to be there and tended to.
To begin, empathy is a choice. We make a conscious decision--we formally decide--to go into someone else's life in our minds. This doesn't just happen. It can feel like it just happens as we move forward as we get better at being empathetic, but what we're doing requires conscious choice. We set aside time--whatever that looks like--and energy to use that time and energy to look at someone else's life--from within, the best that we can--in ways that we don't automatically do.
Having made this decision to go into someone else's life, we then have to use our imagination. We go into their character. We try to suss out their mindset, what they feel. See how this is like writing? The character is not you the writer; but you must go inside of them.
Having deployed our imaginations, we now have to see. To see what that person sees. To see it as they see it. We our beyond our ken. We are not in our personal air space anymore.
This isn't easy stuff. It won't happen unless you put forth real effort to make it happen. And now that we see, we have to try and feel what that person feels. As if we were them. As if it were happening to this version of us that isn't us at all, save in that we're linked in our humanness.
Now who do you think does this? In a world of me me me me me me and grandstanding and the death of imagination and the all-out selfishness and narcissism and the hatred of effort and how we're do conditioned to put ourselves first, last, and everything in between? How has the selflessness? The wisdom? The humility? The honest-to-goodness concern? You're also taking on a degree of that other person's experience. It's add to your heart. Knowledge is added to your mind.
With those new-found feelings and thoughts of yours, often comes a call to action; this summoning from within for you to do what you weren't previously do when it comes to how you treat that person, how you might help them. And now your empathy is having a direct influence on your life, your behavior, your time, your energy. Maybe not all of them at once--after all, you need not know this person to have empathy for them--but you are being affected by another. There is more in your life now, more is asked of you in terms of decency--even if we're talking how you think--and people don't want that.
You've also now introduced a potential source of guilt. Because knowing what you know, feeling what you feeling, you have different emotional responsibilities--and perhaps actual things you should be outwardly, actively now doing, with your greater sense of understanding--and if you don't do those things you'll feel like a heel, and who wants that?
People will just go online and fake being a good person and pretend to care about that which they don't care about at all--and people they don't care about at all--or else they'd make the actual, not-easy effort to be truly empathetic. What you end up with is a word that people toss around, that very few have any actual understanding of, and fewer still practice at all.
Empathy is draining in one way because you're taking on additional human experience--someone else that is not your own which becomes, in one regard, a part of your own--and not only is that a job that takes real work, it takes real work just to get to the job site. Empathy is uplifting in another way because it adds to one's own stores of humanness; you become more alive than you were otherwise.
Comments