There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us.… [For] we live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.… I hope you don’t listen to this. I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your [orbit] of concern.
—BARACK OBAMA, JUNE 19, 2006
REPAIRING THE WORLD doesn’t always mean putting up walls. Often, it means taking down walls. As you’re walking through a city, any city, imagine for a moment that all the walls are gone. Suddenly, society is an open marketplace. Now you can see everyone. Now it’s harder to maintain the illusion that we’re alone. Now our sense of community is palpable. I’m not suggesting we remove all walls. After all, there are legitimate reasons to have walls: for shelter, safety, and privacy, to name a few.
What I’m suggesting is that for the health of our community, we imagine life without walls from time to time. Like a social X-ray, we might benefit from a yearly checkup to see what’s broken or clogged or where something unhealthy is growing.
At the very least, we would see each other without impediments and remember that living together in the open is possible. We might remember that we built the walls. We put them there—or inherited them. It would help, once a year, to assess how we’re living and to discern which walls are necessary and which need to be taken down.
Communism was a failed experiment at the forced removal of all walls. And the extreme of capitalism, with no regard for those around us, is proving to be just as flawed in the other direction, creating more walls than we need.
Crisis often removes the walls for us. When we can see each other so clearly in need, it is in our nature to help each other in the smallest and deepest ways, swiftly and with grace. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated much of the East Coast in October 2012, my good friend Carole and her daughter Jena, who live in the West Village in New York City, opened their small apartment when it became clear they had the only landline working in the neighborhood. Carole said with ease, “We rigged up a bell to ring outside (our buzzer of course wasn’t working) so people could come in and call their relatives and friends. And we had stove-top gas so we could offer a hot cup of tea or coffee.”
The starkest moments sometimes beg for the softest and simplest gesture: opening a door, offering a chair, a cup of coffee, a blanket, or a rub of tired shoulders. The smallest effort of honest care can empower resilience.
The most insidious wall that keeps us from our kindness is the clear one that makes us a watcher. Often, we stand by and watch others suffer because their pain is too much like our own. Or when not in pain, we fear that opening our heart to another’s pain will diminish our contentment. Yet, the bringing down of walls is the work space of compassion.
One test of our compassion is how we honor the suffering of others when we’re not suffering. For while we’re content and peaceful, someone else is fighting for their life, and while we’re struggling with pain or loss, others are falling in love or experiencing joy. We’re asked to honor the totality of life swirling about us beyond the walls we construct around our joy and sorrow. For all things are true at once, and only the depth of an open heart can let these mysteries merge within us until they release a deeper and more vital wisdom.
Yet letting all things in with exquisite empathy doesn’t eliminate the need for justice or social repair, nor does it diminish the pain or joy we each feel at different times in our journey. Still, opening our heart to the plight of others matters. It’s the first step toward finding our kinship with all things. Such openness of heart lets humanity know itself. Such nameless care readies us to claim our place in the human family. For today you may be blessed with the comforts of a warm bed and plenty to eat, and tomorrow you may need the kindness of a stranger. We take turns on the wheel of life: falling down and getting up, or having more than we need and then in time needing more to make it through. In this we all share the same hunger and quench the same thirst.
When our walls come down and we begin to open our heart, the apprenticeship of compassion is to feel for those we can identify with: broken heart to broken heart, loss to loss, illness to illness. But this is just the beginning, the training ground of compassion. Once we’ve entered the ground of our compassion, we’re challenged to open our hearts to those whose suffering is outside of our experience. We’re called to give our hearts over to them just because we know they’re in pain, not pairing their pain with our own, not confining our compassion to the suffering that mirrors our own. This deeper form of compassion is how we grow—through loving others—beyond the limits of our personal experience.
We each have mythic moments, in which our walls come down and compassion arises, moments often waiting in the tangle of our days, moments when someone pauses to see us and speak truth to us, when someone loves us enough to hold us in our pain. I believe these moments and those who enter them are allies, ready to help us along the way. It’s being truthful about our lives that puts us in the open, and compassion that lets us become allies to each other.
Each of us builds a wall. Each of us is surprised by the crisis that makes us take it down. Each of us works at the apprenticeship of compassion. We all cycle through the wall, the crisis, the opening of our heart, and the discovery of our kinship. No one has ever been you, but compassion lets us wash into each other like watercolors.
The bringing down of walls is the work space of compassion.