Compassion: June 2023
Some days feel filled to the brim. At night I ask myself, “where did the day go?” The past few months have been especially busy as we sprint toward summer. The other day when I picked my son up from school, I did what I normally do, I reminded him about what we “needed” to do the rest of the day. On this particular day, I told him he had soccer practice. But he didn’t react the way he normally does. Instead, he burst into tears, collapsed on the back seat and cried, “I do? I’m so tired! Do we have to?” The exhaustion in his voice was raw. Sadness washed over me.
Lately, our lives have become a blur of activity, compounded by my husband’s work travel and, for my son, two consecutive weeks of standardized school testing (a topic for another day). Normally I would push us to finish whatever we “needed” to do—exhaustion be damned! But this day, I didn’t ignore the fact that we were just two humans needing a break. We both needed some compassion and so we took the rest of the afternoon off. We grabbed dinner at the taco truck, ate chocolate cake, and did nothing the rest of the day.
Compassion happens when we recognize our shared humanness, with all of its possibilities and shortcomings, tragedies and joys, and everything in between. Compassion is not some heroic act for rare occasions. It is a choice available to us daily, and it doesn’t always look like the privileged option of taking the afternoon off. Compassion comes in decisions mundane to consequential. And sometimes we offer it more freely to others than we do ourselves. What compassionate actions have in common, when we choose them, is that they strengthen our connections with one another.
From one human to another,
Lisa
p.s. I asked my son for permission to share our story.