A Commonplace Book

Pity and compassion. Compassion involves empathy. You see the stricken person as an equal. Pity doesn't. If you pity someone you feel superior. But it's hard to tell one from the other, even for the person feeling it. Almost everyone would claim to be full of compassion. It's one of the noble emotions. But really, it's pity they feel. So pity is the near enemy of compassion. It looks like compassion, acts like compassion, but is actually the opposite of it. And as long as pity's in place there's not room for compassion. It destroys, squeezes out, the nobler emotion. Because we fool ourselves into believing we're feeling one, when we're actually feeling the other. Fool ourselves, and fool others.

Love and attachment. Mothers and children are classic examples. Some mothers see their job as preparing their kids to live in the big old world. To be independent, to marry and have children of their own. To live wherever they choose and do what makes them happy. That's love. Others, and we all see them, cling to their children. Move to the same city, the same neighborhood. Live through them. Stifle them. Manipulate, use guilt-trips, cripple them by not teaching them to be independent. It's not just mothers and children. It's friendships, marriages. Any intimate relationship. Love wants the best for others. Attachment takes hostages.

Equanimity and indifference. I think that's the worst of the near enemies, the most corrosive. Equanimity is balance. When something overwhelming happens in our lives we feel it strongly but we also have an ability to overcome it. People who somehow survive the loss of a child or a spouse. Unbelievable grief and sorrow. But deep down inside people find a core. That's called equanimity. An ability to accept things and move on. How's that like indifference? Think about it. All those stoic people. Stiff upper lip. Calm in the face of tragedy. And some really are that brave. But some are psychotic. They just don't feel pain. They don't care about others. They don't feel like the rest of us. They're like the Invisible Man, wrapped in the trappings of humanity, but beneath there's emptiness. The problem is telling one from another. People with equanimity are unbelievably brave. They absorb the pain, feel it fully, and let it go. They look exactly like people who don't care at all, who are indifferent. Cool, calm and collected. We revere it. But who's brave, and who's the near enemy?