on being compassionate
While walking along a sidewalk, you notice a beggar without legs or a mother and a baby asking for alms....what do you do? What do I do? What should we do? There were times when I had accessible spare change and I hastily gave it to a beggar (no eye contact). Oftentimes, I ignore them. Yeah, I know, how utterly uncompassionate of me huh? There have been many instances when I justified my momentary apathy towards the needy by saying that they are capable of earning money or are part of a syndicate blah blah blah. And then I realized that I'm becoming a cold-hearted biatch.
Compassion is any action that is a direct result of one's desire to truly help another without expecting anyting in return. I am so affected by the sight of a mother and a baby begging on the street probably because I'm a mother and I have a baby myself. I feel a sort of stinging pain in between my chest and abdomen that resembles, I dunno...kind of like seeing the person that you love with someone else or pure angst. I cannot even bear to imagine my son having to go through some days without eating anything.
It's terrible how poverty exists. How life is so unbalanced. How most of the impossibly rich spend their time doing uncompassionate things. Once in a while they probably feel some sort of compassion towards the less-fotunate...so they donate thousands or millions of their spare change to charities or institutions so that they could pat themselves at the back for being generous for a while. I used to love fashion and lifestyle magazines. Now, I cringe at the memory that I was once so shallow and unproductive.
Once again I feel impotent, inept and helpless. Yes, I may have spare change or extra food but sometimes these things just aren't enough. It's not about looking for who to blame. It's about doing something concrete. We have to be the change we want to see in the world, someone once said. But how? How?
Compassion is any action that is a direct result of one's desire to truly help another without expecting anyting in return. I am so affected by the sight of a mother and a baby begging on the street probably because I'm a mother and I have a baby myself. I feel a sort of stinging pain in between my chest and abdomen that resembles, I dunno...kind of like seeing the person that you love with someone else or pure angst. I cannot even bear to imagine my son having to go through some days without eating anything.
It's terrible how poverty exists. How life is so unbalanced. How most of the impossibly rich spend their time doing uncompassionate things. Once in a while they probably feel some sort of compassion towards the less-fotunate...so they donate thousands or millions of their spare change to charities or institutions so that they could pat themselves at the back for being generous for a while. I used to love fashion and lifestyle magazines. Now, I cringe at the memory that I was once so shallow and unproductive.
Once again I feel impotent, inept and helpless. Yes, I may have spare change or extra food but sometimes these things just aren't enough. It's not about looking for who to blame. It's about doing something concrete. We have to be the change we want to see in the world, someone once said. But how? How?
12:34 PM
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