Look at the Sky

My health insurance company has started a new program called “Positively Well™”.  They sent me a kit yesterday which includes a little journal where I can record my positive feelings. The first targeted feeling is compassion.  I’m ambivalent about my insurance company’s foray into my personal life, but I’ve been thinking lately about compassion and what often seems its opposite, judging.  I spent many years as a writing teacher, a job that involves so much judging.  Many of the excerpts I include in this blog are judgments about the state of the country.  Can I write about these things and still be a compassionate person?

I guess I should start with how I define compassion.  I once mentioned compassion to a friend, and she asked, “Do you mean pity?”  No, I do not.  Some describe compassion as empathy which is a pretty good synonym.  However, I think it means understanding the shared humanity between myself and others, understanding that they, like me, struggle.  They experience the same joy and suffering.  I think this understanding can move from an intellectual idea to a knowing in the heart.  When I manage to feel compassion for Wayne LaPierre, president of the NRA, I’ll understand compassion much better.  I want to spend some time contemplating and writing about this compassionate way of perceiving the world.

There is a song that says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”  Peace with what exists seems also a form of compassion, especially compassion for oneself.  Of course I want to be more peaceful, but will it make the world more peaceful too?  I like this suggestion about making space for peace by Pema Chӧdrӧn from her book Taking the Leap. 

The next time you’re getting worked up, experiment with looking at the sky.  Go to the window…and look up at the sky.  I once read an interview with a man who said that during the Second World War, he survived internment in a Japanese concentration camp by looking at the sky and seeing the clouds still drifting there and the birds still flying there.  This gave him trust that the goodness of life would go on despite the atrocities that he was witnessing. 

Looking at the sky, even thinking about looking at the sky, reminds me that we all live together here under the sky and all alike celebrate and struggle.

I keep revising this post.  There must be a better way to describe this.  There probably is.  What helps you practice compassion?