Its Not Empathy If Its Easy

When we rise, even briefly, up the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, our capacity for compassion and patience widens in ways we didn’t know were possible. At each turn in the book of my life, I am trying to live from that higher place.

The true challenge, the real strength, is to stay there even when others do not meet us halfway in our pursuit of empathy and growth. Compassion means little when it is easy, when it flows toward those we find likable. Real empathy is proven when we offer it to those we dislike. Real empathy is when we give those we once loathed or felt threatened by the chance to come to us anew, without dragging into the present who they were a year ago. That is empathy.

Empathy is not about bending our principles or excusing what is inexcusable. It is about seeing a person beyond our own emotions, beyond our judgments, and recognizing another human being struggling to survive. It is about giving them the calm we reserve for ourselves, within boundaries that protect us. Empathy is creating space for terrible people to become good, and judging them only in the present, not by the weight of who they once were.

Empathy that costs nothing is not worth mentioning. True empathy does not mean taking risks on those who have caused harm. It means withholding resentment, watching quietly for who they might become, and accepting them as they are: not as we wish them to be morally, emotionally, even against the weight of the balance of right and wrong in the world all we imagine what they stand for would once hurt. It means letting go of anger, of unfulfilled expectations, and seeing even the most broken person as someone’s child trying, however poorly, to make their way in the world.