Have Compassion…
Miller Williams

“Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”

Oooh, how I love it when words find me, “where the spirit meets the bone”…that gave me chills.

One of my favorite things about the internet is how I’m always just a mouse click away from brilliance, or zen, or wisdom. It’s the possibility that keeps me here long after I know I should shut the computer down. But seriously, read that quote again. Doesn’t that make it all worth it?

This quote speaks to a lesson the universe has been hitting me over the head with repeatedly lately. I just love how, once the cosmos has decided you need to learn something, you keep banging into it over and over again. It chases you down until you one day open your eyes and say “damn…this is what you were driving at? okay, okay, I get it already”…and begin the process of integration and understanding.

It is so easy to be compassionate and understanding to people who treat me well, who do things the way I want them to, who follow the rules I have decided people should live by. But the people that don’t…that’s where I’ve been struggling with the notion of compassionate living.

It’s a tough lesson to learn. To recognize judgmental behaviour as it arises, to own it without personal recrimination, and to set it aside and look with depth and kindness both into and beyond the behaviour or event or person who evoked that response. It requires a constant awareness that I can never, ever ultimately know who a person is at their deepest core. I can’t know their battles, what makes them most weary, what sort of pain they are acting out of. I can try, but I can’t ever really, really know – anymore than someone else can know these things about me.

To find true, authentic compassion, without resorting to condescension or excusing poor treatment that really should be addressed, there’s the real challenge. What does compassion look like? It doesn’t look like pity, that’s for sure. It’s not always cloaked in empathy, for it is unrealistic to assume we can always emphasize. It’s not even always free of expectation or conclusion.

Real compassion involves looking within ourselves - admitting our bias, our tendency to judge, the harshness of our expectations – as much as it does looking into another. It requires being open, even when the person we want to feel compassion for is closed. It is working to transmit kindness, even if the person who needs our compassion is being cruel, or distant, or clueless. It is recognizing that deserving compassion and needing compassion are two very different things, and deciding which one is more important. It is not always easy. There are some times, in the midst of complex human interaction, that compassion is the most difficult emotion to access, let alone cultivate and release.

But cultivate it we must. We have to, because compassion is the root of all peace. How can we hope to find peace on a worldwide scale if we cannot find compassion in our hearts for our friends, and our spouses or lovers, for the stranger who cut us off on the freeway, for the child who just spilled chocolate milk across our computer keyboard? True compassion, rooted in a mantra of encompassing lovingkindness, can change our every interaction by gifting it with the potential for true human connection.

It’s not easy. Some days I struggle much more than others, some people in my life continuously remind me that I have a long way to go, some days I don’t feel like extending compassion to anyone at all.

I’m working on it.