Tag: empathy

Convergence: Seeing Others as Ourselves

I’ve been keeping a list for some time of my favorite blogs. There are so many to choose from that discovering one capable of sparking genuine enthusiasm often feels like chance—like gazing nightly at the starry heavens and marveling at what lies beyond human reach. When such a blog does appear, it draws me back again and again, not out of habit but wonder.

Relying on that list, I came upon a short paragraph-poem this morning by Dr. Drew Lanham, the award-winning African American professor of environmental studies at Clemson University. Lanham confesses to being “a man in love with nature—a wanderer finding foundation in wild places.” What follows is both intimate and expansive:

Handle my life in your hands as if it were your own. Feel the heart beating—small as it may be—and imagine it in your own chest. Beating in syncopated time to become shared meter. That pulse, the breathing, is your rhythm. Your in’s and out’s, its in’s and out’s. Look close under
whatever warty skin or soft fur or gaudy feathers and see self. Its being is your being. Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow. Then, when the convergence between you is sealed, release that wild soul to free roaming as you would desire of your own.

What strikes me is the poem’s quiet tone: a persona grounded in kinship with the natural world, alive with empathy for the vulnerable. Applied beyond nature—to our fellow humans—it gestures toward something transcendent: a way of bridging difference, whether of creed, ethnicity, or race.

Such bridging begins only when we recognize our linkage, when we are willing, even briefly, to see ourselves in others—“Be in that same skin for what moments it will allow.”

Lanham wrote this poem after rescuing a frog from his cat’s pursuit.

Beyond Self: The Power of Empathy in Troubling Times”

In this anxiety-ridden age, I’m sometimes tempted to tune out the endless cacophony and retreat into a myopic vista of self-concern. But in doing so, I’d foreclose on empathy, essential for promoting understanding, compassion, and a kinder world.

It’s why I read daily and widely. To not do so exacts a price I’m unwilling to pay. Favorite author Elif Shafak expresses my sentiment superbly:

“It is the Age of Angst indeed, but it will be a more dangerous and broken world if it were to become the Age of Apathy. The moment we become desensitised. The moment we stop following what is happening in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan… the moment we stop thinking about our fellow human beings, and their stories and silences, here and everywhere…. the moment we stop paying attention, we stop connecting across borders, we stop caring.

“If there is one emotion that really should frighten us, it is the lack of all emotions. It is numbness. It is apathy.”

—rj

A Great Feeling Comes

I’ve always found suffering difficult. I write not of myself but of others. From a child, I’ve been for the underdog. In America, in spite of its E pluribus unum imprint on our currency and a bloody civil war to end slavery, racism still lingers.

I remember being appalled as an eleven year old, gazing out of a train window as we sped toward Miami, the shacks, the impoverished black sharecroppers laboring in the South Carolina and Georgia cotton fields.

The South was still racially segregated, the legacy of post reconstruction days, later engrained by the United States Supreme Court in 1896.

Separate schools, separate accommodations, separate seating.

I was attending sixth grade in Coral Gables, Florida. All of us were white. Going and coming, I’d catch transportation at a bus terminal. Water fountains there were designated Whites Only, Colored Only.

I chose to drink from the fountain for the Colored.

A white man took me aside, directed me to the fountain for Whites. I rebelled.

I don’t know where this empathy came from. My urban family was racist. Our neighbors likewise.

My first encounters with blacks was in the military. In basic, my upper bunk mate was black. I had a close black buddy. Sadly, I lost him in an on base accident.

I’m still learning to listen to the grievances of my black brothers and sisters.

But back to the empathy element.

Driving home from my barber this morning, I saw this bedraggled man along the shoulder, pushing a cart, presumingly filled with his possessions, and accompanied by a dog.

How many thousands like him? And this in America.

Lately, I’ve been reading a biography of the eminent American psychologist and philosopher, William James. For years I kept a copy of his The Varieties of Religious Experience on my nightstand. I hadn’t known of his first love, Minnie Temple, a kindred spirit, intellectually his equal, a vivid conversationalist with strong opinions and inveterate rebel, eager for life, but doomed by tuberculosis, like Keats, at age 25.


In her last letter to William, which he kept all his life behind a photograph of her at 16, her hair cut short in an act of social defiance, she wrote:

“The more I live the more I feel that there must be some comfort somewhere for the mass of people, suffering and sad, outside of that which Stoicism gives—a thousand times when I see a poor person in trouble, it almost breaks my heart that I can’t say something to comfort them. It is on the tip of my tongue to say it and I can’t—for I have always felt myself the unutterable sadness and mystery that envelop us all—.”

This is how I feel each day.

This is how I felt when I saw that man this morning with his canine friend. Where will he sleep tonight, find food?

I think often of the homeless,

the warehoused forgotten in nursing homes,

the millions, lonely and estranged,

those terminally ill, often in pain,

the daily dying in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza.

Even though it often yields no solace, I’m unwilling to wish empathy away.

–rj