That Thing

Talk about Synchronicity. . .I wrote the following yesterday with the plan to post it today. . and now with osf and Toby's comments (especially Toby's) - well, yeah.

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I’ve been thinking about compassion. Perhaps inspired by the Dali Lama’s visit, perhaps from hearing about empathy in my ICM class, perhaps from the gentleness my mom is exhibiting in the face of her father’s decline, her sister’s insecurities, and her mother’s panic. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been struggling lately – my blues are encroaching in tighter and tighter circles. I’m fighting it, but I am so busy these days that I don’t even notice what’s going on until I’m cloaked in monotony. These oh so gray days are flat, disheartening, and discouraging. It’s not depression - that is too personal – it’s more of an anhedonia borne from the underbelly of the medical profession. It’s the despair that comes from crying uncle on trying to hold onto the life that once ways; it’s the defeat you feel when you accept that your life can no longer be relationship-centered, at least for a while.

Lately compassion has been in short supply in my life. I’m worn down by my friends, I’m annoyed by a patient’s complicated presentation, I mutter about my housemates for the chaos that is our fridge. I can’t remember the last time I felt positive about a class and just about every sentence I form starts with the words, “You know what would be great,” or “Why can’t they just. . .” My parents never say the right things on the phone and even Annie, the dog, rubs me the wrong way. Basically, I’m sitting deep and dark in the thick of it.

I’m convinced that compassion is the cure. But compassion is a funny thing and while I know that I need to breathe more, compassion more towards those around me, I think that the real deficit is inward compassion. Just like that age-old adage, you can’t truly love others until you love yourself (or something like that), I’m not sure it is possible to express compassion towards others until you feel compassion for yourself. Can you even know what forgiveness feels like if you don’t forgive yourself all the shit you do wrong? And if you have never felt forgiveness, can you genuinely give it to others?

This may be coming across as all wooo-wooo-y , so let me try and clear it up a little. See, I am beginning to see that compassion is an art that walks the fine line between being patronizing and being invested. I don’t really know what it truly looks like, or feels like, because I am either too engaged or too removed. When I am too involved, my feelings become my focus and I can’t get any perspective. When I am too distant, I view those suffering with curiosity or, even worse, pity. Thus far, when I say “I have compassion,” it is linked with a sense of having figured out the other person’s problem, being beyond his or her problem, being unaffected by his or her problem – and there is some superiority in there that doesn’t belong. And there is the strange paradox that I experience which is that the more compassion I feel towards someone, the less connected I feel to them. Even my closest loved ones – when the compassion washes over, the detachment creeps in, and shortly thereafter the dissatisfaction and the loneliness. Obviously, I have some serious work to do.

This brings us back to wise words about compassion. “Be compassion,” is likely less about giving compassion to others and more about breeding compassion from within. And to do that, I think forgiveness of self is required. This means I have to forgive myself when I have to cancel an obligation. I have to have more compassion when I fail at doing daily living things (like getting my oil changed, making my bed, cooking). I have to let myself fuck up on tests, cry because I fucked up, and rationalize both of those events. When I get annoyed at my peers – forgive. When I am not exercising as much as I would like – compassion. When I skip class – permission. Even though everyone else around me seems to be handling it all so much better – compassion, compassion, compassion. That’s not to say that I should throw my hands up in a relativist fit and say, well, none of it matters anymore. Of course not – I still strive to improve all of those things, I still evaluate my (endless) shortcomings, I still fight and cry and struggle. But I work on decreasing the guilt, quieting the critic, and just slowing down the panic. Perhaps once I have that down, then I can spend some time figuring out the whole golden rule thing.