C is for Compassion
C is the third letter of English alphabet. Interestingly, C has a lot of interesting and emotional words starting with it — clever, capable, charming, creative, caring, comfortable, calm, courageous, challenging, confident, and so on.
Some of my personal values include commitment, courtesy, calmness and contentment. But, what I want to talk about is something that we don’t have enough of in this world — Compassion. It’s a value that is close to my heart. Sadly, I don’t see enough of it around me.
The dictionary meaning of Compassion is “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it”. To put it in simpler words, it is the ability to feel for another living being. Some other words that allude to the same thing are sympathy and empathy, but both of these have a slightly different connotation.
To me compassion means the ability to step into someone else’ shoes and look at the world from their eyes, forgetting one’s own problems for that duration. It is the ability to be respectful, kind, courteous, selfless and helpful.
When our world is faced with an unprecedented challenge in the form of a rapidly spreading pandemic, it become more pertinent for us to embrace the value of compassion. The world needs it more than ever before. Plato is known to have said, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle”.
One of the greatest thinkers of the modern times, Albert Einstein once said that as human beings we are a part of the universe, just like all other living beings. He said that though we share this universe with other beings, our actions are governed mostly by our own emotions, desires and our affection for other human beings close to us. He felt that “Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. “The reference to embrace all living creatures makes this quote relevant at all times, especially when the human race is trampling upon the environment and ecological balance of this earth, and uprooting the natural habitat of other living beings mindlessly.
As I said in my last post, the right to being, is the fundamental right of all creatures. We make the world richer by extending that right to everyone around us. When it comes to fellow human beings, it is a basic need for every human to feel respected, to feel cared for and to feel safe. By being compassionate, we extend that right to other human beings.
While it is human nature to be instinctively concerned about self-preservation, sometimes we go too far and become so self-centered that we disregard the basic rights of others, we disregard the virtue of being fair and kind, and forget that more often than not the wheel of life comes back to treat us exactly the way we have treated others in the past. The concept of “karma” propounded in the Bhagwat Gita and adopted by the followers of many different faiths, is also about this.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”
It requires a high level of enlightenment to feel compassion for every living being, especially those who are not nice to us. But if one starts practicing it with just the people one interacts with on a day to day basis, one can start feeling a sense of calm, peace and joy in one’s life. These feelings only multiply as you share them with more and more people.
A daily conscious practice of compassion can have a magnificent impact on one’s mental and physical health. It can make you feel more confident, richer and happier. My prayer for the day is that more and more people should practice compassion and make this world a more compassionate place. Amen.
