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So much pops up at breakfast and gives one enormous amounts to think about and digest over the day.
This morning it was how heavily laced with superiority and inferiority are our words.
For example;
sympathy – This word came up because of a Bettina Network Blog a guest had read on Sin.
She wanted our feed-back on her thoughts and she got it in strong terms.
She was contrasting sympathy and empathy. We all show sympathy to our friends, colleagues, family, strangers – we sympathize with many we don’t know and many who are close to us. It keeps us in a superior position to them. Sympathy is always shown between and among unequals. I sympathize with you because there but for the grace of God goes I. For a brief moment, I can pull myself up to be heads taller than you when I find something within you and your life with which to sympathize.
empathy – however is a different concept and a different word. It brings us into equality with our friends, colleagues, etc.
Isn’t it interesting that the word we use most often is sympathy and the word which is not even in most of our vocabularies is empathy.
We stay away from the family, of our friends who have just died because we don’t know what to say to them. We want to sympathize with them, but the right words don’t come and we become all thumbs and stutters and awkward. We have not yet learned the facile way to sympathize – bringing ourselves up above them because we are not in that position of grief. Maybe being awkward and not knowing how to sympathize with someone is a good thing.
If one practices empathy one goes inside oneself and pulls up those experiences when we were in that place and we become one with the person with whom we are trying to relate through empathy. In that circumstance there is no lack of what to say or do. It is easy to meet and comfort a friend or family member with whom we feel empathy or can empathize.
There are many such words in the English language – paired concepts. The most common word of such a pair is always the word/concept which elevates us above the rest. The other half of the pair, which we rarely use, are the word/concepts which make us equal to.
We spent an incredible time over breakfast coming up with these pairs and trying to correct the way we talk and relate. Amazingly, it wasn’t very difficult, it was a conversation and an exercise we took to like ducts to water.
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