284. Falling Short

Even if I always do everything I possibly can to help others, there will still be those who won’t receive the compassion they need from me. Despite continuous effort to see what I must do and then do it, my actions can still fall short. This happens because my awareness is imperfect. Where my awareness is lacking, I’m unable to see the most compassionate course of action.

Even with an unshakable devotion to seeing clearly, I still won’t achieve perfect awareness. This is partly because the world around me is complex and varied, which means there are more kinds of experience than the ones I’ve already had or seen. It’s also because there is more to myself than I can fully grasp, and uncovering all of my hidden desires, aversions, and beliefs is itself an endless task. I can try to expand my awareness by allowing my attention to be open and free to explore everything I encounter, but my progress towards perfect awareness will always be partial.

I need to be careful that the knowledge that my awareness is necessarily limited does not cause me to purposefully limit my compassion. This can easily happen, as I might become attached to an aversion to the hard work that compassion often requires. To guard against this, I have to allow myself to regularly reflect on my own actions, motives, and intentions.

Sometimes I’ll discover that I’ve misled myself. I’ve allowed my actions to be less compassionate than they otherwise could have been. There is no point in dwelling in shame or guilt over this, but I still need to take responsibility. Doing so includes figuring out what the correct action would have been so that I can become more sensitive to similar circumstances in the future.

Compassion has no time for worrying about past actions that can no longer be changed. Its orientation is always towards the new actions that can be taken today, in the present moment, to help meet the current needs of myself and others.