Excerpts

Read below about the first of the four truths discussed in Snow Rising.

Chapter 24
ALLEVIATE SUFFERING

He didn’t know how to bring it up. Twenty minutes of the allotted hour’s rest had passed.

“Tell me about the axioms,” he managed.

“Come sit,” she said.

They sat side by side in the snow, heels dug into the slope.

“You know,” Clara began, “human beings have an embedded desire for complication. If we don’t understand something, we assume it’s because the system or sequence underlying that thing must be blisteringly complicated. So, we give it lots of parts and pieces, many more than it actually has, and then lose ourselves in the mechanics. However, natural systems tend to be much simpler than our intuition suggests. Usually, they are beautifully elegant in their simplicity. Einstein’s theory, E=MC2. Even if you have no idea what it means, you can understand the simplicity of it, can’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose,” he responded.

“Empedocles, a Greek philosopher who lived in Sicily and was influenced by the great mathematician Pythagoras, put forth the idea that all matter is composed of four roots or elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Hippocrates subscribed to the idea of the four elements, however, he viewed them as elements of the body. In his day, Aristotle was influenced by these principles and expanded on them. Over time, these fundamental ideas were applied to mental thought and behavior.”

Jason wondered if Einstein, Hippocrates, and Aristotle had anything for him.

“Carl Jung studied these ideas thoroughly and conceptualized the four elements of personality as intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling—clearly derivatives of the work of Empedocles. Today, corporations and organizations the world over test potential employees for compatibility using the four personality variables of Myers-Briggs typology: Extrovert/Introvert, Sensing/Intuiting, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. The Keirsey Temperaments—Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, and Rational—are also popular. There are others, too, each a direct result of the work of Empedocles.

“If you apply for a new job tomorrow, in computer technology, construction, or counseling, whether you’re hired or rejected might depend on answers that highlight principles first put forth by a philosopher who lived twenty-five hundred years ago. It boggles my mind. Everything changes while everything remains the same.
“Four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. Or carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Or intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling. We search the world over for the complicated truth, and all the while it hides behind our simple minds. John Foster Dulles said, ‘The problem is not that we have problems; the problem is that they are the same problems we had last year.’ Axioms will break us out of the habitual pattern of revisiting our problems and looping through them time after time.”

Clara stopped and looked directly at Jason.

“So, what are these axioms, these four simple elements that combine to set us on a path of truth? Four axioms that, when overlapped with the values and characteristics we discussed previously, produce your father, and when overlooked, have the potential to -produce awful, destructive behavior? These axioms are the earth, air, fire, and water of human activity. They reduce the toll of violence. They are the foundation of an influence for good.”

She had his attention.

“The first axiom, Jason, is compassion.”

“Compassion?” he asked.

Clara nodded.

“It is the ability to identify with the suffering of others and a drive to alleviate that suffering. Specifically, it’s a desire to alleviate any suffering, which is different from wanting to resolve all suffering. To say that I’m responsible for the alleviation of all suffering is overwhelming. The job is too big to know where to begin. However, the alleviation of any suffering means that I’ll commit to helping anyone, not just family, friends, or people who think or act like me. ‘Any’ reaches out to all people, even (and perhaps especially) those who do not fall within my ‘socially acceptable’ box. Maybe this person thinks differently from me, believes differently from me, acts differently from me, and sees the world differently from me. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting that you adopt the person’s beliefs or lifestyle. That is not being compassionate. That is being a chameleon.

“Compassion requires that we get out of ourselves, out of our own way. It focuses our attention outward. It requires us to experience suffering through the eyes of the sufferer—not just to see it but to feel it, to be vulnerable to it.

“In compassion, we remove ourselves from the throne at the center of our world and put another person there. The last person I want making judgments is someone with little or no compassion.”
He wondered how compassion would fit into a work environment that was cutthroat and highly competitive.
“Compassion is love in action,” Clara continued. “It is proactive. It is fearless. It is usually inconvenient. It is not always friendly, or soft, or charming. It contains the great elements of love, forgiveness, unity, empathy, sympathy, altruism, charity, tolerance, inclusiveness, caring, equality, freedom, and benevolence. There is a very close association between my feeling of compassion and my willingness to forgive. Compassion’s antonyms are hate, enmity, and selfishness. Hate will never yield good. Hate grows out of fear; we usually fear something first and hate it later. Compassion distills selfishness into empathy, opposite ends of the same line.

“Listen up, because I want you to hear me. I believe the whole of humanity is interconnected. If one man gains, the whole of man gains. If one man falls, the whole of man falls. There is a great synergy in this interconnectedness, in this unity of man.”

Jason ran his hand through his hair and took a deep breath. “I think I have a pretty good notion of compassion. I watch the news; I see horrible things happen to undeserving people. Good people just trying to get by day to day. My heart goes out to them. I’ve witnessed various forms of ruin—people who have made what they thought were good choices that led to disaster for themselves and their families. I get it, Clara.”

“No, you don’t. Not even close,” she responded.

“Excuse me,” he offered, shocked by her directness.

“You get sympathy, maybe even empathy, but you don’t get compassion. Big difference. You watch events unfold that severely impact people and you feel sorry for those people. Perhaps you empathize with them, maybe because you can imagine putting yourself in their place. Compassion is beyond empathy. Empathy is a feeling. Compassion is an act. Compassion demands a rescue. Empathy simply considers the possibility.”
A dry pit was forming in his stomach. Memories. During a lifetime of justifications he’d repeatedly thought about extending himself, lifting someone who’d been pulled down, who needed a boost beyond their own ability to break the crushing centrifugal orbit of discouragement, failure, or loss. It was, however, painful to come face-to-face with the fact that rarely did he act; rarely did he take the time or go to the trouble to reach out and be constructive. He was willing to admit that his inaction was partly the result of not wanting to help and partly because, in some cases, he didn’t know how to help. He didn’t have access to the secret formula for lessening the pain of loss, so, instead of acting poorly, maybe even improperly, he did nothing instead.

He remembered, painfully, an instance some years ago when a neighbor had lost a young son in an auto accident. He didn’t consider the family to be close friends, but close enough for him to attend the funeral, which was all he could think to do. What do you say or give to a mother and father suffering over the death of a young son? Children are not supposed to die before parents, and when they do, the guts of a generational clock are ripped out, never to be the same again. Do you show up at the door with sub sandwiches and Dr. Pepper? Yes, he learned later, when he saw another neighbor do exactly that.
It occurred to him that perhaps there was no “secret formula,” no mysterious elixir that would cast a spell of contentment over a household in crisis. Perhaps, he remembered thinking at the time, it was just the act of doing that contained all the value. He later convinced himself it couldn’t be that simple.

Still, something was bothering him.

“You know, Clara,” he said, “it occurs to me that I have a hard time feeling much compassion for a person who I perceive is responsible for causing a negative outcome or event. I feel much less compassion and am much less willing to forgive. What I really am, I suppose, is angry and resentful. If compassion is an all-encompassing truth, how does it play into that kind of experience?”

She pursed her lips, considering her answer. “Good stimulus, good response. Bad stimulus, bad response. Do you remember the problem with that process?”

“I do. Our happiness is taken hostage by whatever stimulus comes around. We divorce ourselves from being responsible for our own sense of joy. And most of our happiness is not found in the stimulus, but in the response. So? How does this apply to compassion?”

“Well,” she said, “for whom are you causing problems when you live in a state of anger and resentment? You, maybe? You described this process. Anger—rip. Resentment—rip. We become our own worst enemy.”
She looked at him closely, seeming to sense that she’d just touched him.

“Will you do something for me, Jason?”

“Of course.”

“Is there a person in your life for whom you harbor a significant pool of hate and resentment? Someone you’d like to tear limb from limb if the consequences weren’t quite so inconvenient?”

He thought for a moment. “Yeah, I suppose so. One or two.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m that person. I’m sitting here next to you. If that were true, how would you feel?”

He took a deep breath and pulled back his outstretched legs, clenching his lips and tightening his fists.

“Look at you,” she said, grinning. “You went from relaxed to tense. Just thinking about that person brought stress and conflict. You’re ready to fight, right? Knock-down, drag-out.”

“I’m ready to fight. I owe them a shot or two.”

“I understand. What you need to understand, though, is that holding onto resentment is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die. Anger destroys the person who is angry just as hatred destroys the person who hates. It is a form of suicide that kills just as surely as guns or pills. It does us no good. Do you know that stress causes more heart attacks than genetics, poor nutrition, and a lack of exercise combined?”

“Yes, I believe I’ve heard that,” he admitted.

“Your choice to be unforgiving, angry, hateful, or resentful of someone you perceive has harmed you translates into far more problems for you than it does for that person. And to make matters worse, you may very well be dead wrong about the person and what you -perceive he or she did. Sometimes what seems obvious is not so simple. Give it up, Jason. Spend your resources some other way. Perhaps compassion is the first step in reducing your anger and resentment. Try to see what happened through the other person’s eyes, realizing that your own view may be distorted.”

“Sounds good, but how does that work in real life?”

“Let’s use something specific. My daughter, Rachel, is up to her elbows in a very tough problem. Did you know that on any given day, within the hospitals of our major metropolitan cities, ten to fifteen young people will be admitted with multiple gunshot wounds? Weaponry is different from what it was twenty years ago. The revolver is gone. We now have nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistols in the hands of kids with attitudes; put those kids in at-risk environments, and we get death and destruction.”

A visual image played in both of their minds.

“Rachel is a trauma surgeon in one of those hospitals. Do you know that many foreign countries—Japan, Australia, and especially the Scandinavian countries—prior to sending surgical teams into war-torn regions, send them first to the major inner cities of the United States for triage training? The medical term used to describe this kind of treatment is ‘damage control.’ Why here? Because they are likely to see as many multiple gunshot wounds in a month in a hospital in the U.S. as they’d see in a career back home. It’s great combat surgical training. Not much of a commentary for the world’s leading industrialized nation, is it?”

“I had no idea. That’s awful.”

“It is awful,” she agreed. “I remember Rachel struggling with the responsibility of removing a bullet from the arm of a youngster who was too young to receive a license to drive a car, yet had just gunned down several kids his own age. Beautiful young lives cut short in the blink of an eye. Talk about anger and resentment. She admitted to me that it was all she could do to treat the wound. What she really wanted to do was punish the person responsible for the carnage, to take a life for the lives he’d taken. After all, those deaths were not caused by cancer or some long-term illness, but by selfish and self-serving decisions.”

“To put it mildly,” he remarked.

“It came as a spontaneous thought that she could choose to see the deaths from the perspective of this young teen. He became a young teen rather than a gunman as soon as she offered him the compassion to consider the possibility that there was a core of humanity in him. It wasn’t until she began looking at what was happening through the eyes of this youth that she began to understand that his circumstance was, in fact, its own kind of corrosive disease—a cancer embedded in the very heart of our society.”

Unexpectedly, a wave of emotion lodged in Jason’s throat. What was happening to him?

“As she and her colleagues looked deeper,” Clara continued, “they found a triad: at-risk kids, at-risk environments, and semiautomatic weapons. They sequenced the problem. They found that if they could disrupt any one of the three, they could disrupt the rate of killing. It wasn’t until compassion entered her mind-set that she was able to look beyond her immediate outrage and see the real problems. Then she could begin to form adequate responses, or at least responses that could help reduce the epidemic. Her hypothesis was so compelling that she began to volunteer in inner-city youth organizations, offering her experience and perspectives to kids.

“Simplistically, I guess what I’m saying is that compassion allows you to take a bad stimulus and turn it into a good response. Hate will never do that. Anger will never do that. Fear will never do that. Resentment, jealousy, and all the rest produce bad responses, which in turn become bad stimuli for the recipient. Who will have the guts to step forward and stop this spiral into hell? Gandhi said it well, ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’”

Jason shifted his weight. “What caused your daughter to make the shift away from anger and toward compassion?” he asked.

“I suppose it was her own pain,” Clara said somewhat wistfully, “which came in the form of having to look in the faces of young parents and tell them that their children, their hope for the future, had died on the operating table, that she didn’t have the skills to save them. That kind of pain will either drive you forward with determination to find an answer or it will drive you backward with determination to exact revenge, or maybe to just curl up and disappear.

“To this day she can hardly speak of these experiences; the pain is that great. But she used that emotion as fuel for positive change. These are not easy problems, but compassion is a foothold on the path upward.”
“Your daughter sounds pretty amazing.”

“She is. So is the power of compassion. It can be brutally honest and understanding in the same moment. It is never enabling of poor choices. It has no litmus test. It bonds a person to the rest of humanity. It doesn’t worry that it may not have all the answers or know what to say or do. It is simply committed to doing something, anything. It is color-blind, belief-blind, behavior-blind, and hate-blind.

“Compassion, like love, is the commitment to the growth of another person, which defies our Western notion of love and companionship as a commitment to find a person I can attach myself to who will give me what I want. There is no love or compassion in that, only selfishness.

“Perhaps the ultimate expression of compassion is to befriend someone who considers you their enemy, and to alleviate their suffering. That kind of behavior makes friends of enemies and turns hate to understanding, perhaps even love. And it is sorely needed in a world whipped into a frenzy of violence and revenge.”

“You sound a little like a bleeding heart, Clara.”

“Maybe. But if we had more bleeding hearts and fewer weapons, what might this world be like? History’s greatest teachers have all advocated for softened hearts. Perhaps only a soft heart can bleed. Your choice, Jason. You choose your own path.”

He nodded, chewing on his lower lip. Then he spoke softly. “I’ve got a question. How do compassion and justice coexist? I’ve heard it said that compassion is no substitute for justice. How do you reconcile the two?”

“They are not mutually exclusive, not at all. An axiom will never exclude good. Injustice is the enemy of compassion. But justice without compassion is just plain scary. Justice without compassion is revenge and punishment, nothing more. That kind of justice produces more of the same—more revenge, more anger, more resentment, more frustration, more hate. Justice with compassion is accountability and responsibility, and perhaps progress. If both parties, the one harmed and the one responsible for causing the harm, are held accountable and are humble, good will come of bad. I would not want to live in a place where justice was meted out without compassion. It’s been done, and the results are unacceptable.”

He considered his usual behavior, then cringed.