Walk A Mile
For the longest time, I wasn't able to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy. They sounded the same to me, and they quite nearly matched in meaning. It's just one of those things I let go of for a while and I felt just fine not really caring to figure out the difference.
Turns out I really didn't need to care, since "stepping into my shoes" is about the biggest cliche ever told. Every other book hides it in their basic moral scope here or there, it's valued in journalism as perspective, and for just about every freelance writer or artist it has some sort of meaning.
Once I figured it out, though, I could do the math. There's a missing factor in sympathy that makes empathy so much rarer and more valuable. Quite literally, the empathetic are those who have stepped in another person's shoes, seen the same or very similar experience from their viewpoint and can offer some honest words of condolence or happiness or whatever emotion there is to talk about. For the rest of us, the sympathetic, our feelings are somewhat blocked by the fact that we just haven't been through what you've been through.
But another thing I've noticed- and maybe I'm wrong- is that both of these things are important to nurturing our own sensitivities and feelings. The extra credit conclusion is easily that sympathy and empathy yield compassion.
It's definitely important, at least. Every writer and artist should hope to get that chance, to walk in someone else's shoes in a genuine fashion. But it shouldn't be forced or come from the author's hidden desires- it should come from some stroke of life, someone getting dealt an off card. In order to get the ability to empathize one should probably be able to say they had the experience. To sympathize one should say they feel compassion intensely for others. And to have compassion one should be turned towards it around them in life and take blows and free rides as they breeze by.
Experience is the real tell-tale sign here, but beyond that there's a sense of awareness that perhaps we should all try and connect to more often in daily life.
