Compassion

Compassion is something, as many of us can attest, that often eludes us writers. It's difficult to capture into words and often loses something in translation. I think of it as trying to project a cube in 3-D onto a paper in 2-D; it just loses its dimensionality along the way. Not that it's always the case in writing- a select few have been able to adequately transpose the human phenomenon onto paper and hallowed the pages of a few truly great books, but those are often one in a million.

It's interesting because compassion is something that most everyone can understand- it's a bit too simple to not have universal understanding. We learn as younger kids that we are to treat everyone like how we wish to be treated, and it seems understandable and logical, plus when we practice it it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. It's a far cry from the evils of guilt and depression and it creates the same feeling in the recipient of the compassion that it gives us at the end.

And yet, a lot of us consider it as simply an obligation to fill, in a lot of circumstances literally a paper to fill out. Banking more hours doing community work or service projects isn't necessarily the mark of a true citizen's citizen. It's a pretty cliched statement, but it's really true that those who can feel the best coming out of a volunteer or service experience usually have done the best job. It's a bit selfish if we really think about it- the principle is that your enjoyment is heightened when you do good deeds in earnest and therefore make the person you helped feel that good themselves. But as long as it works for everyone, that's all that really matters.

For those of us who like to see things practically and can appreciate a bit of worldly realism, we can understand that that's often not the case for most of us who embark on missions to do good deeds. We end up feeling good because of the fact that we logged more time or feel we've acquired bragging rights from it somehow. But the principle is still maintained; everyone's happy so it's a win-win situation.

I feel like I've just performed calculus with feelings, but in the end what I'm hopefully getting across is that compassion and volunteerism are as close to each other as they can get, but how we relate the two personally is an open question. Any combination of selfishness and selflessness can go into how we define compassion for ourselves. That's kind of why many writers end up in these ruts when they're writing their stories, because the perfect concotion of earnest- one that isn't too good to be true and yet just real enough to be genuinely helpful- is so easily eluded in so many books. Those of us who can get the right balance together despite our own ideas of what compassion is are wickedly talented, then. That's why we can learn to appreciate books about love and valiance and self-sacrifice and the good samaritan just a little bit more.

In our effort to define compassion we're trying to look for as many perspectives as possible, and if that's not a hint I don't know what is. Happy July!