Mitleid

In German, the word for compassion is "Mitleid": a compound word: mit = with, and leid = suffer.*  It's also sometimes translated as "pity."

I'm sure I've blogged about pity: standing above a person and feeling sorry for them.

Have you ever felt that instinct - when we see somebody who is uncomfortable or suffering - to think "It's her fault" or "He brought this on himself" or "This is their choice"? When someone returns from volunteering at the soup kitchen, it's how they express frustration that the people they give their time, money, and goods to are wandering around with nothing to do, smoking cigarettes, sporting new tattoos, or otherwise not using their scant means to the volunteer's approval. It's when we meet somebody who's depressed, and tell them to "cheer up!" It's when we treat our neighbor's cold with more coldness, as if a person were no more than their germs.

I once told a person my most embarrassing moment**, and his reaction was: "I never want to marry somebody like you." I was in Germany at the time. We were also on a train. Not sure how this is relevant. I wonder if he remembers.

Having compassion actually means getting down off our high horses and suffering with. This means never, ever allowing the words "you chose this" to come out of our mouths.

There is a theory floating out here in cyberspace that reading certain kinds of books helps develop empathy***. I think what it might do is connect sympathy with positive reinforcement. Reading good books often feels good, but it also makes us think like somebody else, and we have to be willing to follow the character through his misfortune if we want the full impact of the denouement's peace. Sometimes, especially when rereading or rewatching, I have difficulty sitting through the hard parts (You know, like when Elizabeth really lets Darcy have it - because you know that even if he deserved it [HE SO DID], she's going to regret it later when she realizes how much money she just stomped on). I often feel like people feel the same way about me: when I'm in pain, they all step back, or flip to the last chapter.

I was very, very poor a few summers ago: I couldn't afford to buy fresh produce. There are local programs that I could have used to help me through the hard times, but I found when I thought about using them that what I really lacked was not food. I can live just fine on food-storage spam. What I wanted was Mitleid. I needed someone to break the alienation that is the twin and companion of all misery.

Someone did. I could never hope to express how grateful I am to that person, that they would come over, sit, and talk to me. This person even iced the cake of conversation. They bought me a whole refrigerator shelf of fresh produce. It took all my self-control to rinse that tomato before I bit into it like an apple.

When a person is in debt, he does not forget it. Want is felt in a way that plenty can never be. It is the same with emotional problems, health difficulties, or even sin - whatever you conceive it to be. People in pain do not need to be reminded that they are in pain. But if instead you sit down next to them, if you sacrifice your perfect day to making somebody else's better, the oddest thing happens - the connection you make with another person will fill all the need that no amount of career success, dating euphoria, or boss-fight wins can match. 

 

 

 

 

* This kind of literal translation is a bit of a travesty for linguists, who are naturally aware that the meaning of words can change drastically over time. So even if the words seem identical to us as non-native German speakers, they may never have meant what they seem to mean contemporarily. It's all rather confusing, really.

** It's pretty bad, but not unique. There's an entire line of chemical products marketed to solve this exact scenario.

***This seems ironic to me, because the favoring of "literary" fiction as "above genre" is actually the antithesis of empathy, in my experience. I learned most of my empathy from science fiction and fantasy, like The Prydain Chronicles, and The Discworld stories, Ursula LeGuin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Octavia Butler.