Intellect is not a substitute for empathy. I have a bit of the former, always want more of the latter, and often believe I can transmute one into the other through some rigorous mind-permutation of how an individual could be feeling at any one time. I am starting to think this isn’t true. I think the permutation machine might be throwing false positives of understanding and I am getting it just wrong enough to cause the worst kind of alienation imaginable. To believe you are empathizing, but in reality to just be thinking really hard at someone’s problem, and kind of leaving them adrift on your acknowledgement of something that must be truer, and more human, than what they are going through. This thinking that empathy resides in this “trueness” rather than in their independent experience of the whole situation is like evicting the person you’re caring for from their own being cared for, sterilizing local pain away into some greater truth that life is pain. Sure this is true, but “life is pain” and “I’m hurting” are very different experiences. One is nebulous, and all encompassing like a down blanket over the earth and all its war torn cities, and malnourished, and debt enslaved peoples. The other is acute. I’m bleeding, my mom died, I need addressing! In those moments, to assert “life is pain”, is like, the most assholian thing imaginable. You are so limited by this seemingly ultra-enlightened and exalted state of feeling like its all figured out and you are somehow at peace, or at at least in a puerile and frizzy zen state*. Yet, the person next to you is kind of just staring blankly like, you have been of absolutely no use to me and are potentially the worst shoulder to cry on ever.

I think we just want, and need, to marinate in sad together for a second.  It doesn’t need to mean anything. This is a culturally known thing, you’re not supposed to immediately try and start solving peoples problems when they come to you with them instead of listening, unsolicited advice is the worst kind, ect. I think instead of thrusting “world is tough, that’s a fact Jack” on someone, it might be more helpful to dip into that fact and feel the world being really tough in that moment with that person. That it is redemptive towards life to sit and to look at your friend intently and to study their words in the context of who they tell you they are, not who you assume they are. As, who I think you are has way more to do with me than you, and maybe cognizance of that fact is the first step. The first step towards truly holding hands in this valley of shadows.

 

*One is not in a state of Zen. Zen is a type of Buddhism. The state to which I am referring to is mushin no shin part of the practice of Zen Buddhism, but you catch my drift.