Wants2Fly,

You sure have given me some good meat to chew on lately!

I think a lot about compassion, because it seems to be at the core of the disparity between me and my mother. My mother is just amazing at “doing” compassion…she must send birthday and anniversary cards to 100 people, and never misses. When someone is sick, she always visits them, and when a former member of her church was living out her final days in a nursing home, my mother went to see her every single day, for months and months. But my mother doesn’t do these things because she feels compassion…it’s just what she thinks she is supposed to do, and her own sense of perfection demands that she do these things perfectly. When I say she doesn’t feel compassion, it’s not that she is a bad person, but there’s something about her heart that is fixed, and cannot shift to encompass the feelings of others. I, on the other hand, am all “feeling” and very little “doing”. I have empathy in the very strictest sense…I feel pain when I’m with someone in pain, I feel joy when I’m with someone joyful…but I am often unable to translate that feeling into action. I am absolutely worthless in a crisis, because I just end up incapacitated with the feelings of the people in crisis. I am terrible about the little “niceties,” such as those birthday cards that my mom is so good at, because they come from the head (remembering the date).

So in the end, which of us is the compassionate one? Maybe we both are, or maybe true compassion lies somewhere in the middle. You used the term “open-hearted” and I think that’s a very valid one…without the ability to actually let someone else infuse your heart a bit, it is not possible to truly understand their needs. On the other hand, a heart that is too open cannot maintain enough internal strength to be able to perform the actions necessary to be useful. So in seeking compassion, maybe one needs to ask the question of whether it is in opening the heart, or in taking action, that one needs to improve.

Your points on hierarchy are also very compelling, but I think I will give my thoughts on that separately, to avoid confusing myself.