256. The Joy Of Compassion

When I’m aware of my needs and the needs of the people around me, it feels necessary for me to take action to meet those needs. This is the action of compassion, which arises directly from awareness of need, and which works to reduce unnecessary pain and suffering.

When I take compassionate action, I help to meet my own needs and the needs of others. Having one of my own needs met can be a source of joy, for it gives me both fulfillment and release from concern over that need. Helping to meet the needs of another person can be sometimes even more joyful, as it grants me a sense of purpose and value.

255. Caught In A Net

You want to understand the world as well as you can, so you’re always reading. You read thick academic books, books about science and technology, books where experiments, models, and data are used to produce hard, satisfying conclusions.

You’ve learned a lot by doing this, but you’ve also been wondering about the justification of science itself. You want to be certain that the results you’ve discovered are reliable and won’t soon be replaced with entirely different conclusions.

254. Blocked Empathy

When I see someone suffering, I feel the need to help them. I feel this is necessary not only because I rationally understand that their suffering is no different from my own, but because I feel their suffering as my own.

It is out of the awareness that all suffering is shared that I try to respond from compassion to a person who is suffering. The first step in such a response is usually to communicate. I need to better understand the other person’s situation in order to see the source of their suffering.

253. New Ideas

It had been weeks since he’d had an original thought. Everything in his brain had been living there for ages. There were no new arrivals. He was stuck. Every day it was the same worries, the same desires, the same ideas. His mind had become solid, worn down with lines tracing the paths of the same thoughts and feelings that kept recurring.

He thought the problem was that he wasn’t seeing anything new, and this meant he couldn’t think anything new. With new stimulus, new ideas would emerge. He started going for walks around the neighbourhood, paying close attention to everything he saw. He started reading books that went beyond his usual interests. He started asking people questions he wouldn’t ordinarily ask. He started watching alternative films with strange premises and even stranger titles.

252. Learning The Rules

Education is a process of learning the rules. While we also learn many facts about the world we live in, what we are mainly taught is how to value and judge correctly. We are taught rules of reason and logic, of grammar and mathematics, of art and science, and so on.

We are often explicitly told the rules, but we mostly learn them through practice. We are shown a way of solving a problem or expressing an idea and we perform that method until we develop a habit of following the rule. Through this process of education, we are inculcated into our society’s shared normative structure, which is composed of all of the rules that make our society functional.

251. An Impractical Life

Our lives are dominated by practical concerns. We make choices based on the likelihood that they will cause our material situation to improve. We optimize ourselves around variables we can measure, maximizing the quantities we value and minimizing those we do not. We look for practical reasons when we need to justify our decisions to ourselves and others.

We do these things because they are prudent and they help us move closer to our desired goals. We measure our successes and failures in units of practical value that we call wealth or status or fame. We want our lives to include all of the things we want and none of things we hate. We sometimes even see everything in terms of its practical value, to the point that we see value itself as having a practical foundation.

250. Exploring Discomfort

There’s something bothering me that I can’t understand. It’s a thought, or it’s a memory, or maybe it’s an intuition. When I try to think about it, it seems too complex to describe, too faint to see, too indistinct to capture. The feelings that surround it are nebulous and imprecise. I want to see what it is, but I don’t even know where it begins or ends, or what form it might take.

249. Harsh Judgments

Where my values are strongest, my judgments will be harshest. When I see someone behaving in a way that feels not just wrong but repugnant, I cannot accept it. It’s contrary to everything I believe is right and good, and so I feel obligated to respond.

My response might be nothing more than a verbal reprimand to the wrongdoer. Or I might want to seek out some kind of punishment for the wrongdoing, to remind the other that their actions have real consequences. In extreme cases, I might even want to banish the wrongdoer from my community, in order to keep it safe from harm.

248. A More Truthful Response

How do you feel? This question was one she had always struggled with. To offer up a canned response like “fine” never felt right. It didn’t feel right because it wasn’t wholly true. She wasn’t just fine, and saying so seemed to lack honesty.

Honesty was important to her, but whenever she would try to conjure up a more truthful response, she found she couldn’t locate any words that were up to the job. There were always so many feelings present in her and there didn’t seem to be any way to summarize them into a sentence or two.