Empathy Also Required
The world has been A LOT over the last few years hasn’t it and I, for one, would like to return to living in times that won’t be studied by future historians. It has been a time of pain, heartache, sadness and true despair. However, a ray of hope has been those little anecdotes of the positive influence of the human-animal that I have heard through social media that has provided some support to me. The crux of many of these has been kindness. And this got me thinking about how different people respond to different situations and what exactly kindness is.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, kindness is the act of being kind (!), which it defines as being “generous, helpful, and thinking about other people’s feelings”. The aspect of this definition that strikes me the most is that of the consideration of other people’s feelings, which led me to look at the definition of empathy – “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation”. It is that ability to look outside of yourself to see the wider impact that your actions will have on the people around you, your community and the world as a whole.
Watching the recent news stories from around the world, it seems to me that both of these are intertwined and symbiotic in the acts of bravery we have all witnessed. These have been many and varied: from the acts of individuals to those of groups/cities/countries, etc.
I have often wondered if I would be brave if I was faced with some of the atrocities others have witnessed and risen to accordingly. I imagine that most of us have wondered that and I think that for many of us, the answer to this could lie in our initial reaction to seeing these events – do you ask yourself, how will this affect me? Or do you ask yourself, how can I help?
The act of being brave is, to me, the ultimate combination of kindness and empathy. It is an act of selflessness that allows you to behave in such a way that you understand the dangers involved, but you take them anyway in order to help others. Even if you know that the outcome may be your own death.
