What if complete and utter empathy is
possible? What if it is not only possible, but required? Empathy as I
understand it is about an understanding of feeling. It’s the
infinite sadness of losing someone you love. Maybe it’s the awkward
settling in to a new social scene. Some know the ability to be pushed
to absolute rage that negates pain and the passage of time. You may
talk to a therapist or best friend about your experiences and they’ll
say “I understand” like everyone trained to engage/dodge where
you’re coming from. But when is it the best talk? Is it platitudes
and a rub on the back or when they immediately know what the next
course of action is? Do you want someone to tell you they understand,
or guide you through in a way that validates your feelings when the
words are never enough? Understanding of feeling; true compelling
empathy that moves someone in the way they know you need to be moved.
I argue (read: hold various strong
stances towards or against things) constantly and talk a bigger game
than anybody I know. I know that I do not translate my message that
makes others feel it like I want them to. There is a lot of trouble
you can get into if you relegate everything you think or feel to
talk. Luckily, I act, but nowhere near the amount I talk. I sort of
feel I’m in a perpetual dress rehearsal. It’s like one day I’ll
get my TED talk and lay my case out so brilliantly and like
Nick P, you will be forced to walk away from it moved to action.
That feels like a worthy challenge or intellectual pursuit. I just
have entirely too much theory and not enough data.
And that data can come in many forms.
Before I’m anything, I want to be pragmatic. If I wasn’t able to
pay the bills, maintain a friend, or even scrap the surface of pop
culture or politics, I don’t think you should even bother with me.
Data for instance with the turning my car into a cab thing. I already
worked a cab job, I already know there’s room for more cabs and
more getting drunk people home safe, and I know how much money there
is to be made. Until I come home with a few hundred bucks in hand, I
don’t even believe me. Granted, I find this odd, but if I didn’t
believe it at least in some very important way, I wouldn’t pursue
the endeavor in the first place. It’s a mismatching in
understanding between expectations for the not experienced future and
the ever present now. Maybe I just need to refocus on “ignoring the
future.”
I wonder sometimes how much of my
experience is because “I’m fairly certain this is the correct
thing” played against “this is novel.” It really does take,
what feels like something special, because it’s so few and
fleeting, to get me excited. Accidents, taboos, spur of the moment
decisions, stirring up emotions or conversations that I’ve forced
into existence. It’s not so much “risk seeking behavior” as it
is “something worth contemplating” or “something that might
dramatically change the perspective of all involved.” When I think
of the million and a half reasons people don’t do things, I always
settle on the very fact of my decision to do so being the only one
that matters. If I decide, I win. And people don’t empathize with
that.
I can feel fear and uncertainty. I’m
perpetually doubtful. I’m always going to go too far and have to
make nice. But I’m still going to explore. I’m still going to
take a chance. I’m still going to know that there is a simple
enough take on a complex picture that can take the infinite
uncertainty and see it tamed. It’s empowering in a way that you
can’t help but be respectful. It’s “too much power” tempered
by the endless perspectives it allows you work with and think about.
It’s something I wish everyone felt. It’s something that should
be freely exchanged via shared experience. In my mind, in many ways,
it’s how I idealize humanity.
I don’t consider myself, necessarily,
a good person. I know I’m frequently capable of going out of my way
to be a bad one. Underneath these empty judgments about myself is a
basic inability to call anything good or bad without a context. I
have the freedom to forgive or condemn, not the obligation. I have
the potential to flip a desk and crack a foreign fuck cab driver in
the face equally to the potential to walk away. Whether you choose to
accept circumstance or fate, given the many more ways I have to
alleviate problems in my life, I found it “best” to walk away.
May your god help you if you think I’d never do otherwise. With
this in mind, I see my goal heavily characterized by a burden to
create context.
For as good a shit talker as I can be,
I need to make sure as many of my actions are far from judgments
that don’t take into account how I think a future maybe healthy
society should behave. This is a far cry from making excuses for
peoples’ behavior. I’m not going to abstain from holding a door
open for a fat person because “they need the exercise” for
example. But as far as interpersonal relations go, I’m hard pressed
to move much beyond basic civility, at least currently. This I think
mostly comes from what I see from history. People need a thick skin,
they used to have a thicker skin, being kind of dickish to dicks or
dick-like things merely flavored the overall conversation. I also
think it’s a nice spring board to the even harder conversations
that require honesty, accountability, and introspection.
I suppose one of the methods I’m
dying to see the results of is rewarding the personality. I literally
want to enable people to be more of the kinds of people they are. I
think there is a forgotten dividend to respecting respectable people
and cultivating a culture of people you want in the future. I think
there is a big guise we operate under where life is this thing that
happens to us and we have to deal with. I mean, the very reason I
don’t go insane is a commitment to creating something new and
touting that which I find worth respect. I freely obligate myself to
a world that could eventually make sense filled with people I don’t
perpetually hate. I want to contribute to the pool of resources you
can dip into to feel where I’m coming from. Because god knows it
must be hard to follow a lot of these blogs.
In a weird way, I
feel like when “I win” everyone does. And I’m not winning until
everyone actually is. The fate of my happiness or action/inaction is
intimately tied to the degree in which you actually feel it. I want
to send a message that can be heard a billion different ways that
results in a single thing; a feeling of infinite potential. I want us
to arbitrate the context. I want us to write and rewrite and rewrite
the rules until the exercise becomes as absurd as the presupposition.
We need to feel what we idealize or we’re stuck with what we fear
and hate. What we fear and hate will never “disappear” to the
realm of merely informing our perspective until we know there’s
something more. No, I don’t think it’s something that can be
given to you by a sky daddy or guy in a fancy robe. So, that’s
where I come in.
