We all have our definitions of a good life, but my idea is to have an experience in which I can feel joy and practice compassion. Once, I wanted to be famous, and I was briefly rich by pre-billionaire standards. Those things have lost most of their meaning for me.
I believe I have to define what a good life is before I can have one.
I am not famous, and I am not rich, but joy and compassion are attainable things for me, at least some of the time. I think no sane person can be joyous all the time or compassionate all the time.
I define joy as a personal feeling of elation, something that is good for the soul, a sense of pleasure, satisfaction, a great achievement. I find joy when I create or cause something beautiful and uplifting to happen; I am learning compassion when I am helping someone other than myself in a healthy and useful way.
Compassion and joy are two of those words people like to throw around, especially spiritual people. It is easy to seek happiness and compassion, not always so easy to find either.
Compassion, says Henri Nouwen, asks us to go where it hurts, to enter the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely.
And to weep with those in tears.
In my life, and in the lives of the prophets I admire, compassion asks us to stand with the weak, be vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. In one beautiful piece of writing, Nouwen says that compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
I work every day at being human, I come close once in a while, close enough to keep me going.
I was in great pain this weekend, and I have a sister who has been in great pain for some time.
She has given me great lessons in compassion and friendship through her suffering and her compassion for me.
I don’t give her advice, offer solutions to her problems, promise cures.
Instead, I share her pain with as tender a hand as I can manage.
I am silent with her in her strength and fear and am merely present. I don’t know; I can’t cure, I can’t heal. We love one another in the overwhelming reality of our powerlessness.
I think that is what it means for me to be someone who cares and who is learning how to feel joy and to practice compassion.
Dear Jon,
If this is intrusive and you don’t wish to discuss it, please pardon me, but I’m sure some of your other readers have had the same questions. You have spoken several times about your brother. I can’t help but wonder how he can be so far removed from the agony you and your sister suffered. Is he much older? Much younger? It just doesn’t compute.
Several of your recent posts have spoken directly to me. The one about what we owe our friends and what they owe us was particularly insightful. My sister had a habit of finding needy people who took and took but could not give. My mother had a wry saying: “Do your duty bravely, smiling all the while, helping as you find them lame dogs over stiles.” She often remarked that my sister had found another “lame dog.”
Abrupt you might be, almost welcoming the label of crusty; but I admire your forthrightness and honesty and, as Mister Rogers used to sing, “I like you as you are.”
Keep on keeping on and may you be well, happy, and peaceful.
Jean W. Allen
Thanks Jean, it isn’t intrusive, I did write about it. But I’m not comfortable discussing my brother any further online, it doesn’t feel healthy or right to me. Thanks for the note.