Privileged Glimpses

Meditations on Empathy (and how postsecret.com is making me a better person)

Empathy underpins everything good and wonderful that happens on this pretty planet of ours. Cultivate an ability to put yourself in the shoes of any other person, rich or poor, lefty or fascist, ugly as a foot or pretty as a Cara Delevingne, and you probably have this business of living cracked.

One fabulous website instilling good empathic (or should that be empathetic? The eternal question...) habits in all who visit is http://www.postsecret.com/, 'an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard'. Every Sunday provides twenty or so privileged glimpses into the human heart; some will break your heart, others will make you hoot with laughter, all expose the myth that there is such a thing as normal.

Postsecret is doing a really valuable thing; encouraging us to see beyond the boxes we put people in and the labels we shove on them and to just see the human being underneath. It is a lovely little reminder that many people are terribly lonely or a little bit broken, that we all carry secrets, and that what we see on the surface is never the full picture. 

On this, a tricky and divisive weekend in my part of the world, railing against a 'them and us' culture and showing some love is all I ask of the world.

(Brené Brown (of that fabulous TED talk on 'The Power of Vulnerability') gave some rather dazzling insights into the difference between sympathy and empathy, among other things, in a recent lecture at the RSA which I would highly recommend. Have your mind blown here.)

Here endeth the hippy rant.

PEACE LOVE AND HAPPINESS,

Ailbhe

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You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird