Liberating Spaces

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…“.

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My identity has always been a mixed feeling. On the one hand, my grandfather (my mother’s father) was from Madrid and all his children have a strong feeling of being Spanish, understood as mainly speaking Castilian and understanding Spain as one unity with a common culture. On the other hand, my grandfather (my father’s father) felt himself as a Catalan integrated in an ideally plural Spain, where all different cultures could learn from each other and live together.

Myself, I feel Catalan, but I also feel Spanish. I feel Catalan because I understand and share a common culture that surrounds me. I feel this culture as unique (as other are) and worth preserving and protecting. I love the mountains, rivers, cities, towns and sea of Catalunya. I feel it is my country, the land where I was born, where I lived for 25 years. It is the land loved by the people I love. Though my mother tongue is not Catalan (my mother and father always spoke to me in Spanish), when I hear someone speaking it I feel at home.

I feel Spanish because I feel comfortable and myself when I speak Spanish. My behaviour and culture reflect in many acts and words what others all around the peninsula do and say. When I think of love and sex, I imagine passion and depth, an act that joins two people beyond its mechanics and physical pleasure. When I think of Spain – of Sevilla, Toledo, San Sebastian, Formentera, Ronda or Madrid – or I am with Spaniards, I feel at home.

These two identities are for many hard to combine. In my mind and heart they do exist together. And I feel happy about it. At then end, what is really important as humans is not what we “objectively” think is true, but how we feel about it. And I feel good about being Catalan and Spanish at the same time. I just wish others could listen more to their feelings and make their mind an accomplice of them. Perhaps we all will understand that we share more than we think.

We use the word egocentric to define someone who experiences life as something purely happening around him, where his body and mind are the centre, and the world turns around them. This way of living is very often transparent for the person at the centre. As the emperor without clothes, he doesn’t see the reality as others’ see it, but as he sees it. All his experiences are filtered by what he is thinking and feeling. All his memories are about himself. He is insensitive to what others feel or see. He doesn’t listen or observe, he just experiences life for himself. I lived for many years like this. And I am paying now the price. I hope I have changed.