On Thanksgiving Day, I learned that, despite our family's shopper having loaded up on groceries at 4 different stores the evening before, we were short a few items, and I was designated last-minute-pick-up-person. After checking store hours, I decided to give Ralphs a try. Although I often frequent smaller neighborhood markets, during the Pandemic I adapted to online grocery orders and simple parking lot pickups at Ralphs, a real grocery store. Now I was actually going back inside on Thanksgiving Day! I had forgotten the sheer volume and size of that store. It overflowed with aisles of fresh veggies and fruit, and refrigerated rows of choice after choice. Wow! Customers were rushed, but upbeat, and well...friendly, as I wove in and out and around baskets. My list was a short 5 items, but I couldn't help myself, and added extra treats along the way. The kind young checker was friendly too, asking about my plans, joking with me about the last minute ingredients. We laughed together and wished each other a fine celebration. As I loaded my own car, I felt a sense of a larger community, still working to dissolve remnants of our years of Pandemic isolation. Holidays are avenues for healing.
As this weekend comes to a close and Gaza war hostages are being released on both sides, it seems to me a powerful time to self-reflect, not just on gratitude, but also empathy and forgiveness. Empathy is an aspect of forgiveness; gratitude is the other side of forgiveness. Gratitude is an antidote to a critical, complaining, dissatisfied mood and mind. Gratitude makes it easier to forgive and forgiveness makes its easier to be grateful, beyond the obvious level of 'getting what we want' in situations. Empathy aids this process in the world of human relationships.
A very simple definition of empathy is our capacity to perceive events from another's perspective. That implies an understanding that other people are not just reflections of ourselves, our beliefs, and value systems. "Another's perspective" includes emotional responses as well as their cognitive interpretations and physical reactions. Human empathy is a powerful force in social stability and coherence, and promotes both concern for and the desire to help others. A collective loss of empathy creates schisms in social order. Not surprisingly, there have been several scientific studies showing that empathy has decreased in this country over the several decades, due to various possible causes. In the last few years, the overwhelming news of Pandemic tragedies and fatalities, the sheer workload of health care workers and first responders, and social isolation is believed to have undermined natural empathy through compassion burnout. Additionally, social media is believed to play a role, as real time social interaction is reduced further and further to meme's, artificial facial expressions, and robotic voices. (Visual facial clues play an important role in empathy.)
Empathy, gratitude, forgiveness--all play a part in our reconciling human events with our spiritual life. Although these are qualities we can study, explore, choose to cultivate through practice, or resist, resent, and dismiss, they naturally spring from the human heart. It is possible that--like flowers in sunlight--we need real world, face to face interaction with other people, for these to blossom. Try your own experiment and see. (Susan Nettleton)
For poetic perspective: https://grateful.org/resource/belonging/ https://onlyart.org/poets/william-stafford/assurance/