Compassion

When we open ourselves to compassion, we help ourselves, we help each other, and we help the world.

In her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, the religious scholar Karen Armstrong makes the case for a world based on compassion, and offers a roadmap for us. In Christianity, compassion is contained in the Golden Rule, which is to treat others as you would want to be treated. This helps us have a society based on trust: we know we're not supposed to take advantage of each other. It seems so obvious that it fades into the background. Unfortunately, in following Adam Smith's idea that self-interest allows markets to flourish and make us all better off, we've forgotten that compassion is also necessary. You can see this in our rising inequality, in our rising defensiveness, and I suspect that in the end, we all lose.

I happened to read Armstrong's book in early 2023. I’d just left my last job, and was kind of floundering. Reading it introduced the idea that there was an alternative to constantly chasing the next milestone, the next thing that would show I was accomplished or special. Maybe instead of missing the next thing in my life, I was missing the whole point of life. I was still working through these new thoughts when my hometown was rocked by sudden violence.

On April 27, 2023, David Breaux was stabbed to death. Known locally as the Compassion Guy, he'd decided in 2009 to devote his life to spreading the idea of compassion after watching a TED talk by Karen Armstrong on compassion. (She won the TED Prize in 2008, and used it to help found the Charter for Compassion. https://charterforcompassion.org/ Accessed June 6, 2024.) He gave away his possessions to do this, and was often unhoused, as he was at the time of his killing. He was a fixture downtown, but I'd always avoided him - my reflexes to avoid talking to strangers never let my curiosity overcome wariness.

In the coverage afterward in the Davis Enterprise, I learned that not only did we share an interest in compassion, but he was also a Stanford graduate. And yet, the fact that he was unhoused had trumped that, despite knowing how unaffordable housing had become in California. Most of my talks on the California economy would include the fact that in 2019, one in five California households paid at least half their income in housing costs. This was before the pandemic, and at a time of record-low unemployment. (https://ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/DemographicInformation.pdf Accessed June 6, 2024) Housing affordability is generally set at 30 percent of income, so this shocked me. Unstable housing situations are very common in California, and yet I let it blind me to the potential for human connection.

I regret not getting to discuss compassion with him. Armstrong documents that every religion is based on the idea of compassion: you are human, I am human, and we have fellow feeling. David Breaux called it recognizing essence. We see each other's uniqueness. By all accounts he was a deeply peaceful human being. His phrase is pretty close to what I think of as compassion. The phrase that I’d been using is that "the light in me sees the light in you." It's how my first yoga teacher translated namaste (more frequently translated as "the light in me bows to the light in you") and I've always loved that formulation. It requires both my light and your light, as well as the connection between the two. I also like the verb see, rather than bow, because seeing can be both the visual act of seeing someone and the deeper meaning of recognizing you as a person.

What do we miss when we turn away from our fellow human beings? What conversations do we miss, what future insights are never voiced, what solutions to problems are silenced when we keep our armor up? And yet we do this every day when we walk past someone, when we judge others, when we hoard our privilege until just having a place to live is a luxury. We’ve been telling ourselves that acting in our self-interest is the right thing to do, but are we any happier? And so I wonder what might happen if we too followed Karen Armstrong’s call to lead a compassionate life.