Compassion

Sometimes I feel that we're living in a world with much less compassion than in years gone by. We've become divided and separated more and more, and we see people on the "other side" as the "enemy," people who aren't deserving of our love and compassion. We devise ways to defeat them, as if life were some sort of game in which the winners get a prize at the end of it. But the truth is that there is no prize at the end of life--we may move on to something else, but we certainly aren't going to be given a medal or huge amounts of cash for having treated our fellow human beings as competitors rather than as fellow human beings. There's much suffering in the world, and most of it is avoidable or fixable--but unfortunately we get so caught up in our own little worlds and our own wants and needs that we don't have time to get to know other people and the conditions in which they find themselves. And that's necessary for compassion--it's impossible to feel compassion unless we know that someone else is suffering. It's important that we look beyond our own fences or walls or whatever other boundaries we think are separating us from others in order to find out just what we can do to help the other human beings who are sharing this planet with us.


Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity.  It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and the deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment.        -Arthur Jersild