Zut Alors! I have missed one!

52/100

Ooops. I actually forgot yesterday. I think I was just so super tired I couldn't really think. I fell asleep and woke up at 4am. I wrote a short story and got ready to have my writing group over for our Saturday writing group.

I had an interesting experience at work on Thursday that reminded me why I love my job.One of my students walked into my office and asked me the following question: "Can you tell me the difference between empathy, sympathy, pity and compassion?"

Because that isn't a hard question! Eeesh. So we started talking. We first looked up each word and I asked him what he thought of the definition. The definitions were often sort of vague and the following is sort of a summary of the 30 minute conversation we had.

I started with pity. We talked about how pity is sort of looking down on someone/something. It doesn't always contain scorn, but it often has some undercurrent to it.

Next we moved on to sympathy. We talked about how sympathy is when you feel a connection to someone and you feel compelled to act. For example, you see a beggar and you feel compelled to give that beggar money because of guilt. It's not too far from pity, but sympathy is still acting almost unconsciously.

Empathy, we sort of talked about how it is the capacity to be able to put yourself in the 'shoes' of another human being. Especially for a situation you have never experienced personally. For example, I have (knock on wood) been fortunate in my life to not have needed to get so much as stitches. However, my best friend is going through a lot with her reconstruction surgery. It's been almost a month and she still has drains in, can't bend over to pick things up and needs help. I can't understand her situation from a physical perspective, but I can in some small way share her frustration and empathize with the difficulty of her situation from an emotional perspective. It's the ability to identify with someone without having had the experience yourself.

Compassion? We sort of decided is the 'noblest' of all the choices. Compassion is a deep awareness of the suffering of another. There is no compulsion to act. It  implies a freedom of choice. An awareness of suffering and an ability to hold that suffering without feeling guilt. To act from compassion is to act almost altruistically. It is the freedom to give to a community without requiring something in return. It is, to me, why Mother Theresa worked with orphans. She had compassion for the suffering of that community. She had no guilt, no order to give, she gave because it was how she chose to dedicate her life.

I then asked  if he knew the idea of apathy. He said he didn't. I shared the idea that the opposite of love, to me, isn't hate. He looked at me. I knew he liked Halo. I said, do you love Halo? He said, yeah! (he's only a freshman, a bit early to love a girl *smile*) I said, tell me what you think about Halo. He told me about how he thought about the strategy, about the graphics, about how great the story line was, about how cool the new weapons were. I told him to imagine I hated Halo. I asked him how he thought I would act if someone said how much they like halo. He said I'd tell people how stupid I thought the game was. How much I didn't like the graphics and thought people that played Halo were dumb. (He'd obviously had friends that didn't like the game). I asked him if how I felt 'hating' the game was different than how he felt 'loving' the game. He's an amazingly perceptive kid. He said he could see how the two were similar. Both people had strong feelings about the game. I said that those feeling were attachments to something. That one attachment would be considered a 'positive' connection and one a 'negative' one, but both people were strongly effected by their feelings for the game.

Then we tackled apathy. I said apathy is not caring about the game at all. If you asked me about Halo and I said that I knew about Halo, had maybe played it a couple of times but didn't care if I ever played it again. I might be considered apathetic about it. I had no attachment to it, or to if there was ever another one of them made. He got that.

It was a fascinating conversation. His assignment was to go and look up different perspectives of those words and tell me what others thought about them.

It was a great class. Thus why I love my job. I love digging into topics like that. Some might say that it had nothing to do with world history which is the 'official' class we are having. I say? It has everything to do with it.

Peace,

MaryKate