Compassion

I jumped into the taxi, already running late for my interview. “180 Maiden Lane,” I barked to the driver. This was my second interview of the week in Manhattan and I was keen not to mess it up.

The man sitting behind the wheel turned around and smiled at me as he started the meter and pulled the car ahead. He had a thick white beard that covered a large part of his face and wrinkles on his forehead revealing his relative old age. He gave the impression of a man who had experienced much pain in his life. Yet his eyes were soft and kind, like a child.

There was bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown Manhattan at eleven in the morning. I twitched in the back seat and shifted from one side to the other. The blaring siren of an approaching ambulance rose above all other sounds. It came from behind me. My taxi pulled over to clear space for the ambulance. I saw that many of the other cars still continued forward on the same road. This was not surprising. In New York, people are always in a rush and sometimes couldn’t be bothered to move aside in spite of the loud sirens.

I glanced at my watch. Only fifteen minutes left for the scheduled interview time, and we were still some distance away.

“Can we go ahead?” I told the driver. The sirens became louder as the ambulance approached. The cars that hadn’t got out of the way obstructed it’s path.

The driver looked at me, but made no attempt to move the car forward.

“Listen, I am very late for an interview.” I explained. “I really have to get moving fast.”

The cabbie continued to stare at me for a moment longer. I shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. Meanwhile, the ambulance roared past us. My cabbie changed lanes and drove ahead.

In a quiet voice, the cabbie said. “What if your mother or brother were in a critical condition?”

“Ha? What?” I didn’t hear him properly.

“What if your mother had an accident and was losing blood. What if she had to get to the hospital quickly and every minute mattered in order to save her life. Then wouldn’t you want all the cars to get out of the way of that ambulance?” His voice was gentle, yet powerful and captured my full attention.

I took a moment to register the question. The image of my mother lying on a stretcher with blood-covered sheets and a glucose drip hanging above came vividly to me. “Yes, I would.”

“Then, what would you think of some twenty-five year old who had an important interview and told his cab driver to refuse to get out of the way? What if those extra seconds delay could cost your mother her life?”

With the scene still pictured in my mind, I responded with anger. “I would think he is an asshole. Who cares about some stupid interview when my mother could die?”

“Right,” The white beard nodded up and down slowly. “Right.”

I took a deep breath, shook away the image in my head and realized what I had just done.

“The person in that ambulance must be someone’s mother or brother or wife, wouldn’t you think?” The driver asked.

I nodded sheepishly. I shrunk back into my seat, despising myself for my self-centeredness and complete lack of concern for the other person’s suffering. My interview was the last thing on my mind, as I spent the rest of the journey in silent reflection.

Compassion is defined as the feeling of deep sympathy for another persons’ misfortune and a heartfelt desire to alleviate their suffering. It stems from a genuine concern for the welfare of others. All human beings no matter how smart or dumb, tall or short, good-looking or ugly, have the potential to be compassionate. It is at the core of our humanity.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a renowned German philosopher from the early nineteenth century posed an interesting question in his paper about the basis of morality. If the most basic human instinct is that of survival, if the primal urge is to stay alive, then how come we hear stories all the time of people who put their own lives at risk in order to save others? We hear such stories during wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. What makes people do such selfless acts?

Schopenhauer tells a story to illustrate this. In a small German town there was a hill with tall boulders on either side. A police car drove to the top of the hill. The cop who was driving saw a small boy standing on the edge, leaning forward as though he were about to jump. The cop immediately ran out from the car and grabbed the boy’s hand just as he jumped. The boy was airborne, falling down and the cop was falling with him. Yet the cop didn’t let go off the boy. Then, his partner who had been in the passenger seat, caught him by the feet and pulled them both up. This incident was all over the papers. When the first cop was interviewed, he was asked about why he caught the boy and held on to him, even though he knew he was falling with him.

The cop simply answered “I don’t know, but I just couldn’t let go. If I had let that little boy go, I couldn’t have lived a single day of the rest of my life.”

Schopenhauer asks How come? How is this possible? The boy was a stranger to the cop. He hadn’t seen him before in his life. Yet in that single instant of time, the cop forgot all about his own family, his duties, his aspirations for the future, and everything else. He was right there with the boy, about to willingly fall down the hill to certain death.

Schopenhauer’s answer is that it was the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that the cop and the boy are one, and that their separateness is only an illusory effect. The truth that was spontaneously realized by that cop was that he and the boy were both part of the same life force, the same universal consciousness. They were like two living cells of the same living organism. Schopenhauer goes on to say that this form of compassion is the basis of human morality.

It is not enough to understand compassion as an abstract concept. It must be embedded in our consciousness and imbibed into our daily lives. This is not easy. The virtue of compassion takes time and practice to cultivate. We have to develop it like we would any other skill.

We can start with a simple exercise, which goes back to the lesson taught to me by the humble cabbie: Think about someone who you dearly love and cannot do without like a parent or a spouse. Now, imagine this person lying on a bed, suffering extreme physical pain. Their clothes are drenched in blood. Several of their bones are shattered. Their face is contorted as they scream in agony at the top of their lungs. Their body has convulsions and the screams get louder and louder.

How does this scene make you feel? Do you feel their grief? Don’t you want to do something, anything you can, to reduce their pain, even if it means that you have to share some of it? Imagine that you take away some of their pain, and it makes them feel better. Their pain is your pain. Experience the sense of lightness and joy that such empathy brings you. Now, repeat this exercise with your larger circle of friends and family, and then your acquaintances and people whom you have met even once. Next, extend this deep feeling of compassion that you experience to everyone in the whole world. After all, every human being wants to be happy and free from suffering.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. All things are interconnected in ways that we cannot fully comprehend. Every thought, word or action that we direct towards others around us will be reflected back to us. Life is not a solo journey, and we are not separate, disjoint entities. We are all part of the same universal consciousness. The blood that courses through my veins comes from the same source as the blood that flows through yours. Your pain is my pain. Your bliss is my bliss. Whatever happens to you affects me in some mysterious, inexplicable way. Quoting Led Zeppelin in the classic song Stairway to Heaven “If you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last, when all are one and one is all.”

I’ve come to realize that happiness is synonymous with kindness. To be happy, we must first make others happy. Open up your heart and you will be able to make the world a better place. In all thoughts, word and acts, we must remember the Golden Rule: treat others the way we wish to be treated ourselves.