Empathy Leads To Understanding

Family is sacred, right? Would you allow another person to harm your mother or your sister? Would you let your father or your brother be killed in the street before your very eyes? Why does it seems so difficult for many people in the world to feel that sort of kinship for their fellow man? I think it’s a general lack of empathy. I think many people look at it as someone else’s problem and they don’t want to get involved. It doesn’t concern them.

While it’s impossible to know exactly how another person is feeling at any given moment, it is possible to use empathy to imagine how that person might be feeling in a specific situation.

You begin by asking yourself
“How would I feel if it were happening to me?”

Then ask yourself how you would feel if it were happening to your sister, your brother, your mother, your father, your grandfather, your grandmother, your son, or your daughter.

When you make an effort to feel empathy for others, you make it easier to see yourself in the same situation — and to perhaps imagine a better way to react and respond to the treatment you see another person receiving.

There are disgusting, ugly, and unacceptable injustices perpetrated on groups of people in the world.
Many times you might feel that it is beyond your control to do anything about it. But I think if it were happening to someone you knew and had affection for — a beloved family member, a gentle young child, a revered elder — that you would find a way to take a stance. To make a stand and help make a positive change in the situation.

You’d care more if it were happening to you.
You’d care more if it were happening to someone in your family.

The truth is, these things are happening to your family.

• We’re all connected in some way.
• We do have a human bond.
• We all have something in common (even if we don’t know each other well enough just yet to know exactly what that bond is!).

Don’t stand by while evil in the world does harm to someone in your family.
You wouldn’t want someone else to stand idle if it were happening to you.