For about ten years Kathy and I traveled abroad every year, to visit our son in Europe and take the opportunity to see more of the world. In London, what do you suppose is painted in huge, bold, uppercase letters in front of every pedestrian crosswalk? “LOOK RIGHT!” When I was a kid, my mom would say again and again to “look both ways” before crossing a street. And so I thought I’d . . . think before crossing this “feel-help synapse”, this moment in Howard Gray’s see-feel-help-change model. I feel some gravity, something drawing me down to earth. Until now, this has been all about me, you see, and about us, the see-ers and the feel-ers. It has been our vision, our feelings. But what stopped me in my tracks as I attempted to write this morning was that from here on, it’s not only about us anymore. Helping involves another person, and those medical students giggling in yesterday’s examining rooms are taught a first principle in the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.”
So before inserting myself into the life of the hapless helpee on the side of the road, I wanted to look not only to my feelings, the direction from which most of my traffic comes, but the thinking as well, coming from the other direction, often my blind spot. Please take 15 minutes to watch this great talk by Daniel Goleman on compassion. Watch until the very end; the ending is directly relevant to our call to leap this synapse, and to the nature and authenticity of that call to help.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Hi John,
ReplyDeleteI'll be leaving early tomorrow for a brief visit with my step-daughter, Lara, and her family. Since I'll be out of touch with the Stand for a few days, I thought I'd share a few thoughts, even though we're still in the middle of our most recent journey so to speak.
A poem from the Writer's Almanac caught my eye the other day. Here it is:
When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It's a Good Thing
by Charles Wright
I always find it strange—though I shouldn't—how creatures don't
care for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you'd name.
Empathy's only a one-way street.
And that's all right, I've come to believe.
It sets us up for ultimate things,
and penultimate ones as well.
It's a good lesson to have in your pocket when the Call comes to
call
What the poem made me ponder is that, of the three people you posited "in the room," in many instances, the other person does not respond empathically to us, and God is (as God normally is) silent (which is not mean "absent"). So, whether or not we are hard-wired (or have a default mechanism) to do the right thing, we better be prepared for that sense of someone "running away" from us, and a resounding silence, when we do the right thing (when "the Call calls".
Also, your comment about "when we leave the room" intrigued me. From a burn-out perspective, I wonder if in many cases I'm not clear on when (for my own health) it's time to "leave the room."
Thanks for sparking all this. Catch up with you in a few days. Hugs to Kathy.
Bill