A thought on sympathy

In each day a little learning. Today's is finding that sympathy is a craft. It's one I've been neglectful of in the past and I wonder, now, how much I've missed.

Perhaps it was simply that life came easy: good grades, easily cultivated talents, warm friends, love. Perhaps I was lucky, or simply oblivious to trouble, or perhaps my quickness at finding solutions made it easy. That same quickness made sympathy difficult -- easier, always, to fix a narrated problem than to feel it. Easier to think that the other person was lazy, unseeing, unable to solve, than to think I had something to learn in the space of their troubles.

When I'm on the other end of it, how much sweeter it is to have a friend's arms around me to say, "this really sucks," or a voice in my ear that says "I know how you feel." Simply that, nothing more.

Dip your toe in my little lake of sorrow, watch how it soaks my world. Sit on the banks and sniff the wind as it ripples this pain to you. Touch the wet sand, its grittiness scraping against your skin. Hear my words, not the echoes of what you yell across the water. Feel just this space for a little while. Feel what I feel. sym, together; pathos, feeling.

Don't tell me how to drain the lake, or that it shouldn't exist, or that the ocean outweighs my puddle so it's irrelevant. Don't throw your stones of advice in to see what floats and what sinks. On these waters, they all bounce. And when I'm on the receiving end of that advice -- particularly from someone I have been trying hard to be sympathetic towards -- all I want is to make the stoning end. I'm hurting enough already.

Perhaps it's that life comes easy to me. I can turn to other ears, other hearts. Ones that drift with me, however briefly, and say it's okay to wallow for a while. They'll be here, bright and strong and unsinkable, until I'm ready to move on.

Sympathy is a craft. Not an art that cannot be substantiated, not a grace that is impossible to attain.
It's a craft that I can hone -- of listening, of holding advice back, of not allowing my feelings for the other to overwhelm what they're feeling themselves.

Perhaps I could only learn to be mindful of the craft when I felt its absence. I'm grateful for the lessons and yet, a part of me wonders -- what are the lessons I missed when I was too busy with advice? How can I play catch-up?