Empathy Empowering
As a poet and a person, I try to learn day by day, hour by hour, as I read, write, live, contemplate, and dwell on questions I believe to be central to humanity. What might I hope to learn? More about the world, other people, life, myself, and everything between and beyond.
I’ll never understand it all, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to comprehend a little more. There are many reasons to do that, and many advantages that come from increasing my personal awareness of the world, from the smallest to the largest things.
Through such sustained thinking, I often get to appreciate more how things connect, how so many things are interwoven, inseparable, conditioned on other conditions that could and would improve if only more people would voluntarily give such things some more attention and care.
Among the very few things I can honestly say I know, is the act of empathy. The act, not the fleeing notion or the concept of empathy, but rather taking time to train my mind to empathize with others, recognize their situations, their challenges, their suffering, and then considering how they may see and reach their understandings of the world.
I believe others might want to practice empathy more, even if it’s initiated first according to “selfish” reasons. You want to do better? Think better? Live better? Truly prosper? Empathize. It really can be as simple as that: remembering others, thinking of others, pondering their pain, which is your pain, even if you don’t realize it yet.
The practice of genuine empathy can empower everyone involved, especially those needing to be empathized with and understood. In having their challenges or suffering recognized, and actively considered, they are no longer overlooked, dismissed, treated as irrelevant; they are identified as integral to the eminence of ourselves and our society.
The respect, attention, love, and possible interventions they gain may eventually help them, through subsequent societal awareness and any number of constructive and compassionate actions, to gain a voice and, more than that, to have some chance to reach a betterment that’s otherwise unrealistic and therefore unobtainable in a purely apathetic world.
The empathist also stands to be empowered with the knowledge of those challenges and sufferings, enough to begin to cultivate further societal awareness (which always begins with one’s self). From there, movements might arise to inspire social, legislative, and other resolutions to help those who desperately need representation and resolution.
To ignore their peril is to endanger our own societal potentials, hazard our advancements, because we cannot leave them behind without stunting our collective progress. So their success becomes ours. In other words, we all may win. Slowing and ceasing cycles of suffering while promoting equality and evolution means the quality of life for everyone stands a very good chance of being improved.
For the less benevolent and more materialistically-minded, such futherances may appeal because they can bring about stronger, more balanced and profitable economies where more communities can prosper faster, together, and more businesses can thrive and grow as never before.
For the more compassionate and spiritually-minded, it means we may move collectively toward a place of peace and personal enrichments that can help us, and others, to escape the old defunct social stratifications of haves and have nots. Their deliverance makes possible our societal salvation.
Eventually, as the willful practice of empathy spreads, more persons and societies may share in the increased wealth of wellbeing, the affluence of altruism, and the general fortune of more secure and mutually-advantageous futures, where unity begets the real greatness so many crave.
Still, it is a question we need to ask ourselves: who wouldn’t want that?
If you do prefer such a kind, positive, hopeful, and reciprocally prosperous future (the kind funds cannot purchase alone), please feel free to share these words and/or my graphic below.
Helping to spread positive, productive, large-minded, and considerate thinking is to begin to practice the power of empathy and to take essential steps toward the prosperity only benevolence, unity, and lasting peace may afford us.
Thank you for considering these words, my friends.
