Empathy
May peace be upon you. How are you fellas doing? Anyway, this post is going to be quite unusual considering my normal posts, anyway, without further ado, let us dive into it. Growing up, I watched a regular amount of t.v, perhaps a bit less than a few kid since I was the outdoorsy type, but I still did, and my screen time consisted of cartoons and anime. Obviously I grew out of the cartoons but anime stuck with me. Now I am not the type to get influenced by an anime character and post statuses about them on facebook and blog about them on tumblr, no I am not that obsessive. I knew very well that most of the ideals can only work in that specific realm and nothing more, right? Right. With a few exceptions. Yes, I am going to contradict myself for a quote by a mainstream anime character that gave me an epiphany. Sounds somewhat absurd? Stick with me, it won't.
Okay, so there is an anime character with the alias of 'Pain', from the majority favorite anime 'Naruto shipuuden'. It goes something like this:
Seems quite a conventional and monotonous one, right? But I came to a revelation that it can be applied to the real life understandings quite profoundly. See, you have to go through the same suffering to have true sympathy for someone, as in, you need to know how the pinch of lodging a splinter feels, or the sting of a wasp feels to actually be able to rekate to someone and comfort them in a similar scenario, otherwise you will just be pushing yourself upon them ("Come on, be a man! It's just a sting" really, you are being a hindrance at that moment and nothing else). Similarly, a person can tweet all they want about the massacres in Ghaza or the carnage that recently happened in syria, but watching 21 jump street in a secondary tab while eating a pizza and tweeting a sympathetic tweet doesn't count for sympathy. But the people whose nights are hunted by scenarios identical to ones happening overseas, or having experienced even a fragment compared to the brutality, they can probably feel their misery alot better than us. For example, the victims of the orlando parade incident, they reasonably have more empathy in their hearts than any of us.
The point is, we may at least try to connect to the ones suffering, do whatever we can through our authority as it just might give some hope or might get a person off the couch and motivated to do whatever they can, because you are just deceiving yourself with the heartless tweet. Thank you for reading to this point. May God help us all. Ameen.
Image credits to its respectful owner(s).
Okay, so there is an anime character with the alias of 'Pain', from the majority favorite anime 'Naruto shipuuden'. It goes something like this:
"If you don't share someone's pain, you will never be able to understand them."
Seems quite a conventional and monotonous one, right? But I came to a revelation that it can be applied to the real life understandings quite profoundly. See, you have to go through the same suffering to have true sympathy for someone, as in, you need to know how the pinch of lodging a splinter feels, or the sting of a wasp feels to actually be able to rekate to someone and comfort them in a similar scenario, otherwise you will just be pushing yourself upon them ("Come on, be a man! It's just a sting" really, you are being a hindrance at that moment and nothing else). Similarly, a person can tweet all they want about the massacres in Ghaza or the carnage that recently happened in syria, but watching 21 jump street in a secondary tab while eating a pizza and tweeting a sympathetic tweet doesn't count for sympathy. But the people whose nights are hunted by scenarios identical to ones happening overseas, or having experienced even a fragment compared to the brutality, they can probably feel their misery alot better than us. For example, the victims of the orlando parade incident, they reasonably have more empathy in their hearts than any of us.
The point is, we may at least try to connect to the ones suffering, do whatever we can through our authority as it just might give some hope or might get a person off the couch and motivated to do whatever they can, because you are just deceiving yourself with the heartless tweet. Thank you for reading to this point. May God help us all. Ameen.
Image credits to its respectful owner(s).
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