155. Compassion Cannot Wait

In an ideal world, our every action would be reciprocated by others. Whenever we would give something to another person, someone would give something back to us in return. All that was given would be returned not out of obligation or duty, but out of the awareness of need. We would feel no lack, no rejection, no isolation and all of our needs would be joyfully met.

But we do not yet live in such a world. We hope for reciprocation, and we try to reciprocate when we can, but often little or nothing can be given in return. The socioeconomic systems we’ve constructed produce endless demands on our time and resources, preventing us from reciprocating fully.

Even so, the reciprocation of basic behaviours is the foundation of a responsible society. We hold each other to account in order to preserve the norms that give order to our lives. To fail to reciprocate in the expected ways would be to become an outsider — a person failing to uphold their side of the grand bargain.

At the same time, we sometimes resent the responsibility to reciprocate. It can feel like a burdensome obligation, particularly when it seems unrelated to our own needs. If others are not helping us, why should we help them? But this is a dangerous line of thinking, because it would mean reducing our own goodness to the bare minimum of what we’re guaranteed to get back from others.

Compassion cannot wait for reciprocation. It must be given without prompting and without any expectation of recompense. This does not mean compassion provides us with nothing in return, but rather that the benefit might not take the form we expect. Compassion often improves the world in an imperceptible way that nonetheless indirectly improves our own future experience.

It’s also possible that an act of compassion will be met with scorn, censure, or even violence. But it’s only through further compassion that we can eliminate the causes of harm. We do this by expanding the awareness of others, so that they can see the need of responding to compassion with compassion. In the end, it is compassion itself that will create the ideal world of total reciprocation.