context and empathy
I realized something last night thinking about my grandmother and her husband. He died on Monday and she is now in hospice and things are not looking great for her. I know I always say I don’t believe in regret, but our letter writing campaign is maybe only a year old and I should have started sooner. But something I realized recently that I would modify from one of my better sayings–Life happens when you’re making other plans. And yes, Death does that too. A perfectly balanced dichotomy that has held true for each one of us, though you’d hope that mostly heavy burden to the right of that idea is not one we suffer in too often. I was surprised, we’ll say that, though I guess that’s what I also must have realized since I did start writing her in the last year of her better life. Right now you hope she’s not suffering, but I also know that’s not promised either.
Without context anything appearing great can be ruined. I feel that has been largely missing from our recent living experience for everyone. Some people’s context seems to be largely unaffected, and some people seem to be very concerned. It’s an interesting conundrum-
Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.
I think you absolutely need context to understand and practice empathy-
Defined:
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
I am realizing context is often the missing component to people’s understandings and misunderstandings of each other. How on earth do we assume people will understand empathy and each other without understanding the context of people’s experiences? How do we understand those people who hurt us, who lift us up, who affect us without trying to understand all that? I think for now I am feeling like I need to almost unburden myself of all the sadness I had for feeling the context of my own life has been left out of a lot. But I also realize I am not going to bother dedicating any space in my brain right now to anyone or for anything that hasn’t been a joy or I am grateful for having in my life. The space I want to allocate to things every day?
Don. Duke. People in the world. Positive contributions I hope to make.
I think if I tried to control the meandering of my mind a little more and was able to spend no time on negative things or influences. Spent more time reading, or creating, well. Things would change in other ways, too. Things might even improve with my health if I didn’t let so many electrostatic things knock me off my game sometimes. This requires I forgive and forget the least helpful elements, of course. And I do. I realized the other day as I was deleting people off my phone I just don’t need to do that. The world is ugly enough with strangers attacking strangers. Why bother letting even just the idea of other people do that. That’s what people often carry around with them–their last idea of a person, and unless they have the full context, often miss the life in between. And right now the life I have to enjoy is now in between my birth and the point of my death. Probably leaning closer to the right of death than the left of life of course. And spending any of that time wasted on those who hurt me, of those I hurt from, isn’t something I need to do again. I’ve always told people to suffer twice is a bad use of time–wait until you know if you must suffer before letting worry, your pre free suffering take you down. But what about after. Why suffer through the initial heartbreak only to revisit it later? Double suffering on the back end.
Not a great use of time. Not ever.
