Empathy (‘in feeling’)
empathy: “The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”
from Greek empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’)
This is an ability I didn’t understand until very recently. Then, thanks to someone who was very close to me and who had an amazing empathy, everything came to me, first as a blow and then a gradual, increasing understanding. In our rationalising world is not an ability easy to develop, though I believe it’s becoming a very important one to go through our lives. In this blog, I talked before about empathy here. I said
This sums up what empathy is: I am here with you, I give you hope, and accompany in your feeling.
At first, when we don’t know how to feel it, we may be afraid of our empathy, for it makes us vulnerable to the bad feelings of others, and we naturally avoid feeling bad. But empathy is not ‘feeling bad with another’, it is just ‘feeling with another’. Yes, feeling with her the sorrow when someone she loved died or her pain when she is sick, but also feeling with her the joy of making love, or when she passes a difficult exam. Empathy is part of a life attitude of openness necessary to get both the ugly and the beauty of our world, if we close ourselves to the former, we close ourselves to the latter. The best two TED talks I’ve seen so far show us amazingly what I mean: “The power of vulnerability” and “I should have a daughter…“.
