Where Empathy Begins

Of all the lessons I’ve learned (and continue to learn), the biggest have intersected with my struggle with understanding and employing empathy. A struggle I only began coming to terms with when I added a chapter on it to The Stoic Creative Handbook.

The punchline, or rather the truth as I see it, is that empathy begins with yourself. If you cannot connect with your feelings and see, hear, understand, and forgive yourself, then you are incapable of doing so sincerely and authentically with others. Until then your relationship with others and yourself suffer.

To say I’m a lapsed Catholic would be an insult to lapsed Catholics, but when I hear (and recite), first Corinthians, I get a glimpse of the divine. In you, in her, in him, in me, in nature and in the cosmos. And I begin to think that I just might be getting closer to an empathic understanding and appreciation. And this has “saved” me many times from the unhelpful, harmful, and hateful stories I sometimes still catch myself telling myself.

Here it is in case it helps you too:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love. never fails.”

And it starts with you.

Keep flying higher!

Scott Perry, Chief Difference-Maker at Creative on Purpose

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