Compassion

I think my give a d$%#’s busted! I get mad just trying to write about this topic. I already erased three paragraphs because I was off on a rant against parents who pamper their children and protect them from responsibility—and even from normal disappointment of not getting everything they want! I was going to compare enabling and caretaking and pampering spoiled weak people with true compassion, but I got WAY off subject.

The voice that’s yelling from the back of my head is saying that lots of people don’t know what compassion is, at least not true compassion, so it gets displaced by all these counterfeits.

Worrying about a teenage young man (nearly adult) getting his feelings hurt because he hears people talking about being frustrated that he and his teammates didn’t put out much effort in a tournament—that’s not compassion. That’s pampering. When parents pay thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of their time to give their sons the opportunity to play a sport at a highly competitive level, it’s right to expect them to perform. It’s necessary. The message otherwise is destructive—we’ll put out the effort, we’ll pay a lot, we’ll prioritize our time, but you aren’t expected to commit or stick with it if it feels too hard.

Complaining to a concession stand worker that your young child doesn’t like hot dogs or popcorn, so why don’t they have chicken nuggets or something your child will eat, is not compassionate. It’s ridiculous. It says the whole world—even the junk food world of concession stands—has to change to accommodate your child’s mercurial tastes.

The father who picked up his two-year-old son and put him on his shoulders and then encouraged his six-year-old son to join him racing his four-year-old daughter to the car—he was not compassionate. In fact, when he taunted the little girl because he (a grown adult man in case I didn’t make that clear) and the older boy won, she started crying. The moron’s response? He talked to her and the older boy the way middle school boys tease each other during competitions. She was devastated.

Maybe I should automatically feel compassion for the moron. Maybe I should see how broken he must be to need to beat his own four-year-old daughter at a race and then TAUNT her to get the sense that his equipment really is male.

Maybe I should feel compassion for the mother who is overwrought that her nearly adult son will feel the weight of other people’s expectations. Maybe I should see that she’s probably pampering and babying him because harsh expectations caused her a lot of pain. It’s not for certain, but it’s likely, and it’s certainly more compassionate than what I start out thinking.

Maybe I should feel how burdensome it is to be the mother of a preschooler who won’t eat hot dogs, won’t eat popcorn, won’t eat who-knows-what-else, but still feels desperate to rush around and find some specific junk food to feed the not-starving child.

Nah. That would be like feeling sorry for the man who had to clean his own house because he got his knickers in a knot and fired the cleaning service while his wife was away visiting family.

Compassion is concern about the welfare of others and includes empathy, the ability to have other people’s feelings resonate in your own heart. It is expressed not in caretaking, but in helping others learn to take care of themselves. It is doing for them only what they cannot do for themselves while expecting them to do what they can do and to learn what they don’t yet know. Burdens are lightened and lifted when shared, but joy shared becomes joy overflowing.