Clay to Amphora

Community rating. I lectured on this topic to students who were half asleep; I spoke about it to people who thought they were important. But all made semblant to listen.

“You basically spread the risk on everyone. In this case the risk of high cost to treat disease. Everyone shares a small part of the cost and everyone knows that they will get treatment when needed. Spread the risk and promote prevention.”

… I put on thick wool socks this afternoon and decided to read. My father used to say that it is better to have cold feet as the blood goes to your brain and makes you think better. A convenient way of convincing an 8-year old boy that it is ok to be in a cold house.

So, I put on wool socks.

… What if we spread the pain? Forget the joy, because I have rarely found anyone who rejoices hearing someone else being happy. They envy. They become jealous. they even become strangers.

But the pain? Does pain unite people? After all compassion is for the need and the needy.

So, I started thinking about a community rating model for spreading the pain.

First, we need to know how much pain there is in the community and of what type. Is it chronic pain such as from deprivation, being ignored, being rejected, unable to have what others have? Or is it a pain of sudden onset, such as the loss of a child, the unkindness of a friend, the coldness of a lover, or the desperation of not being able to make it?  And then there will be cyclical pain, seasonal pain, periodic pain, and pain that belong to no previously felt pain.

Second, we need to convince the pain-free that there is a reservoir of pain in the community they live in even if they do not feel it yet. That there are strangers who sleep if they can, wake up when they must but never move without pain. They are proud strangers, though; they keep their hands in their pockets and never tend them to you for charity. Or mercy.  The pain of tending that hand is larger, vaster, and more painful than all the pain they ever felt.

I rubbed my toes realizing that they were still cold even when nested in thick, wool layers.

“But how does one convince those who are pain-free about pain?”

Indeed, how does one convince a lover that he will not be loved again? Or a man with gold tooth fillings that one day he will chew with his barren, bone-hard gums? Or yet the newborn that he may not make it to his first birthday?

Spread the pain. A community rating of severity and prevalence of pain. So that everyone gets involved in making that reservoir of pain smaller, less severe, less often.

And that brought me to the third step: I needed a working definition of compassion. Immediately checked the dictionary and read:

“sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it”

What was the difference between empathy and sympathy?  The Internet had the answer:

“Empathy is the ability to mutually experience the thoughts, emotions, and direct experience of others. It goes beyond sympathy, which is a feeling of care and understanding for the suffering of others. Both words have similar usage but differ in their emotional meaning.”

Intriguing.

So I did a search of the top sites where compassion was defined: all defined it as “empathy” not “sympathy”. And yet, in our daily lives, the pain that is left unmet, just as the strangers we do not want to meet, exists because somewhere in our childhood, for whatever reason, we learned to feel sympathy instead of empathy.

Somewhere in our childhood, we sang songs we did not understand, but these shaped our understanding of music. Of expression modes. Our expectations.

Silly songs like “Six to seven, clay to amphora.”

Songs that stop us today from spreading the risk; from spreading the pain.

February 8, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014

This essay was influenced by the description of strangers in a book by Michael Ignatieff entitled "The Needs of Strangers". The book was sent to me by a friend from across the pond suggesting that I should read the section on the philosopher David Hume and his stoic attitude toward death during the last moments of his life. Instead, I read the entire book and was touched by its thoughtfulness.