Merriam-Webster defines compassion as “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” When it came to my own mental health and personal issues, I found that compassion was the answer. Now, you may be asking yourself how could stressing about others’ problems possibly help me with mine. While it may seem a bit counter-intuitive at first, it actually makes a whole lot of sense. All I did was learn about other people’s miseries and it made me feel better about mine.
Just kidding.
What compassion actually did for me was unbelievable. The one thing that kick-started it all was understanding pain and heartbreak. To better explain, I’ll have you consider the following situations:
- A high school kid getting dumped
- A bully breaking a 1st grader’s crayon
- Learning about a loved one’s passing
- Finding out you have cancer
- Discovering your spouse is having an affair
- Failing your benchmark exam
Now, obviously we can agree that each of these scenarios is vastly different. Some would even subconsciously begin to order these based on the level of pain or heartbreak each would cause. But what if I told you they all cause the same level of distress? You read that right. What if I told you that a 1st grader having his crayon broken and a spouse learning about her partner’s affair cause the same level of pain.
Consider the two events occurring independently to two separate people or the same individual at different times in life. Put yourself in the first grader’s shoes: that 24 pack of crayons means the world to you. Switch over to the married adult and now, your spouse is everything. Levels of pain are relative and proportional to each one of our lives. Understanding pain in this way was the first step. It helped me realize that I was not alone. Everybody is going through something and to each person, that something is everything. Once you start to develop this sort of empathy, compassion follows naturally.
“…just because the ideal world isn’t achievable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it.”
Compassion is a mindset. Compassion ranges from helping someone pick up items they accidentally dropped on the floor to performing CPR on someone who just suffered a heart attack. The spectrum is wide, but it all starts with a mindset. Consider the following examples of compassion:
- actually wanting an individual to have a nice day rather than just customarily saying the phrase
- Helping a blind person cross the street
- Not feeling threatened, disgusted, or uncomfortable around a homeless person
- Not judging someone based on their gender, looks, color, race, etc.
- Offering a ride to a pedestrian while it is raining
Stop for a second and think about that last example. Would you hop in a stranger’s car if offered a ride in the rain? Of course not, and I wouldn’t either. We’ve all been taught very well to never get into a stranger’s car because it simply isn’t safe. But that’s my point: what if you could? Imagine a world in which you could just hop in a stranger’s car and not have to worry about being kidnapped, or worse. That is the world I envision. Perhaps I’m being a bit too idealistic, but a close friend of mine once told me that just because the ideal world isn’t achievable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it.
But I think it is achievable. I think we can live in a completely compassionate world. Sure, compassion starts on an individual level and there are literally billions of individuals. But lucky for us, compassion spreads like wildfire. Try it for yourself, I challenge you to be more compassionate through your actions. Watch how the world around you changes. Notice how the people around you are all of the sudden much kinder than before. This isn’t by chance. After all, you perceive the people in this world to be as you are and your perception of the them is the reality in your mind.
“…greed fails to satisfy man while compassion never fails to leave man satisfied.”
After discussing this blog post with a couple of my friends, I noticed they all had a similar question: why did compassion help? What’s the correlation between compassion and mental health? I didn’t have a perfect answer, but I was certain of the tangible changes compassion brought about in me. For one, compassion is habitual and developing any habit takes time and effort. This left no room for anything else. Compassion begins with love and love doesn’t leave room for vices.
Understanding distress put my mind at ease from all of my own pain; compassion allowed me to act on my empathy. As I am practicing to become a more compassionate person, I am now better able to control my ego. I learned that ego never let me rest. A man with an ego is always fighting an internal competition, he or she is never at ease. I was never at ease. With a compassionate mindset, you not only desire for your own well-being, but also for everyone else’s. It leaves no room for ego.
If there's one thing you remember from this rant about compassion, let it be this: helping someone else achieve their dream will bring you ten times the joy of achieving your own.
-tKc
I am realizing that sins or vices weren’t labeled as such by chance. They are vices because time and time again they’ve ruined lives and only caused distress. For example, a lustful mind is always suffering and always deprived. A compassionate mind is always at peace. Similarly, greed fails to satisfy man while compassion never fails to leave man satisfied. Nothing but compassion has the power to simultaneously heal you while you heal others. Compassion was my answer and maybe it could be yours, too.
the Kingh cause 