What if we added empathy goals to our lives? It wouldn’t be that hard, actually, because there are so many ways to learn about other people, to increase our understanding of others’ life experiences, cultures, beliefs, feelings. Even talking to strangers that we meet counts, because every one of us is unique, interesting and worth listening to.

Media: movies, TV shows, social media, books, feature articles in newspapers, and so on all give us the opportunity to increase our empathy for others every day. So, here’s mine from yesterday: Flying home from visiting our son and his fiancée (who is from Chile–lots of opportunities to learn more about Chilean culture from her and her friends), I watched an in-flight movie, “Sing Sing.” By the end, I was sitting in my seat with tears flowing. What a moving, beautiful film! It’s based on the true story of a program for inmates called RTA, or Rehabilitation Through the Arts. In this film, we see several men in Sing Sing prison working together, collaborating with their empathetic director, to produce and act in a play, which they do twice a year. Several of the actors in this movie are former inmates who were involved in this incredible, life-changing program. We really get to know them, and their lives, both the hardships and the positive connections. We empathize, and we care. I highly recommend this movie.

What if we connected with more others–not just humans, but other living beings? Animals, certainly. Our home (that is, our planet) would be a much better place if we responded to animals with empathy–our pets who share our lives, farm animals, wild animals, all animals. But let’s push that even further.

I am reading a book titled Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants  by Robin Wall Kimmerer. She has a PhD in botany, and she is also a member of the Great Lakes Potawatomi tribe. For her, as well as for others who are coming to understand that plants are living beings with a social community, via their root systems, and the spores and pollen and other organic compounds that they release into the air. Some people believe that plants make sounds, that they sing. That they respond to music. And so we should thank them for their offerings–their fruit, their branches, even their whole being–that we use, knowing that they are giving of themselves for us, and therefore also not taking more than we need.

But let’s go even further. Kimmerer says, “In Potawatomi, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. …of an apple, we must say, “Who is that being?’ And reply “Mshimin Yawe.” Apple that being is. Interestingly, she goes on to say that Yawe is the animate to be, and asks, “By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent?” If water is animate, we are not just polluting it, but poisoning a living entity. If mountains are animate, when we remove their tops to mine them, are we essentially decapitating them?

As it happens, I was especially drawn to Kimmerer’s first statement: rocks are animate. I was a preschool teacher for many years. My favorite project that we explored with our 4- and 5-year-olds was one they initiated themselves, when one child brought in a pocketful of rocks from the playground and asked us, “Are rocks alive?” We could have just said no, and explained the difference between living and non-living things, but fortunately we did not. We asked, What do you think? And so began a month-long exploration by the kids of rocks. At the end we asked them, what do you think, are rocks alive? Some said no, some weren’t sure, and some said yes. They had various reasons, such as that things that are alive drink water, and rocks found in streams and oceans probably drink that water, or that things that are alive grow, and there are small rocks and bigger rocks. Some said that things that are alive make noise, and when they banged their rocks together, they made noise. Others said that things that are alive can move, and when they rolled their rocks, they moved. One child observed that her rock had red and white streaks in it, like bones and blood. Julia said that her rock could stand up by itself, and so could she! Zane said that when his father went hunting, he only shot things that were alive. But he had seen his father shoot rocks, so they must be alive. Ultimately, we never told the kids “the answer”. They were free to continue exploring, and to conclude as they saw it. And how glad we are that we did not. I think now that maybe the kids were more right than I knew! I have always collected a rock from places I have traveled to, and I love looking at them and remembering the anniversary trip my husband I took to England 26 years ago, and the family trip we took to Alaska a few months ago, and all the places in between. And how do I know–maybe the rocks are communicating with each other!

How much better our home, the Earth, would be if we had empathy for it as a complete living being, with many living components, with a living spirit!

There’s the media—books, TV, movies, online videos, podcasts.

There are the people we meet—co-workers from different cultures, students at the university we are attending, neighbors down the street who maybe put up a menorah in their window in December instead of a Christmas tree. The person that your sibling marries, or the child of your friend who has special needs.

As we listen with an open heart and mind, as we experience the “other” with true interest and respect, our empathy increases. Of course, we are always mindful that individuals vary widely in their interests, talents, personalities and so on. Any one person cannot represent their whole group (culture, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.), although members of that group probably have feelings and experiences in common as well.

And then, hopefully, we spread that empathy around. Empathy is a value that needs to be shared, that other people need to see and hear.

And we may become true allies and advocates for others. As I have found, this is especially true when that other is close to us. When they share the deeper and more personal aspects of their lives. And of course, when we love them and care deeply about them. Then we have an urge not just to share our empathy, but to stand up for them and try to educate others when those others express non-understanding, whether in innocent or hurtful ways, or when they express a genuine desire to understand further.

And so I have found with my own daughter—my beautiful transgender daughter, who came out to us and our family and friends about a year ago, at age 34. She has shared her deeply personal feelings and experiences, and I want to share that with others, as I can.

Transgender people are particularly being targeted these days, with prejudice and anti-trans laws and derision. In fact, transgender people are being used as political fodder, which is so harmful and hurtful. When our family enjoyed a trip to Alaska this summer, I was prepared to step in if anyone hassled our daughter and to firmly tell them to back off! Confrontation is not my normal forte, as my family will tell you, but this is personal. Don’t mess with my daughter! (As it happened, all was fine.)

When someone expresses doubt that a trans person really has always wanted to be the other gender, I can affirm that my child felt that way since she was very young, which she expressed and I wrote down in the journal I kept on her. It’s good to have this written down, because of course she doesn’t remember her early memories herself, as we all generally don’t. She told me, when she was in first grade, that when she was little (presumably early preschool age) that she hoped that she would turn out to be a girl. At age 3 or 4, gender is just becoming set in, and she thought that it could go either way.

She also said when she was 7 that she really wished she could braid her hair. And now she wears long, lovely braids. I can affirm that everyone in the family has commented on how relaxed and noticeably happier she is now that she is living as her true self. It is a beautiful thing!

Of course, as I said earlier, everyone’s experience is individual. Gender is a continuum, and people figuring out how they feel and what they want for themselves can vary. Certainly by age—I read about a transgender woman who transitioned in her 60s. And as for my own child, she remembers telling her older brother that she wanted to be a tomboy when she was in elementary school, and being dismayed when he said only girls could be tomboys.

So please, don’t be silent—share with others what you know, what you have learned, what your loved one has experienced and felt, to the extent that they feel comfortable with you sharing. As an ally, listen to others, and keep listening, and keep learning. Be open. Remember that everyone’s personal journey is their own. In fact, as she pointed out to me, we are all in a constant process of discovering who we are.

Then empathy will increase in a meaningful way, and you will have made the world a truly better place.

(Note: This blog post was written in collaboration with daughter.)

Recently the New York Times published an opinion piece by Adam Grant about the problem of “empathetic distress: hurting for others while feeling unable to help.” He talks about this in regard to many people being so overwhelmed with empathetic feelings for those in our world whose suffering is front-page news every day: Palestinians in Gaza, Jews in Israel after the terror attack, victims of the seemingly endless school shootings.

He says that taking on others’ pain, incorporating it but feeling helpless to do anything about it or to alleviate it, leaves people feeling numb, and eventually they check out emotionally. “Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent”, as a measure of self-preservation.

Grant says that what is needed in the face of large-scale human suffering and tragedy is not empathy, but compassion. “The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it. When we can’t make people feel better, we can still make a difference by making them feel seen.”

However. Empathy and compassion are both vital components of positive social and interpersonal life. We don’t need to create a dichotomy between them that sets one up as better than the other. Grant gives a narrow definition of empathy, saying “Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: ‘I’m hurting for you.’ Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: ‘I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.’”

While compassion is a response to others’ pain, we see empathy as much broader. Empathy involves listening to and trying to get an understanding of others’ life experiences, feelings, perspectives, and so on. So, for example, as a white 70-year-old heterosexual woman, I don’t know what it is like to be a young black person, or how it really feels to grow up knowing you’re gay and being afraid of the reaction if people knew, or living with a disability that too many people see as the definition of who you are. But I can certainly listen with an open mind and heart. I can increase my empathy for others, but this doesn’t mean I am taking on their pain as my own and holding onto it.

After George Floyd was murdered by the police, the comedian Amber Ruffin did a serious segment on Seth Myers’ show sharing how it felt to be hanging out on a porch with her black friends, just having a good time, when a police car pulled up and they were all regarded suspiciously, raising their fear and apprehension, and of course their feeling of the injustice of this. I was deeply moved by her sharing her story.

In the broader meaning of empathy, as it is commonly used, it is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Empathy is not just a response to painful situations. It is total, and it is positive: understanding others as best one can in all their full humanness. It is reading a book set in another culture, and appreciating the joy, the life experiences of others as well as the hardships. It is listening to someone you know coming out to you as transgender, and not only trying to understand their pain as they lived a life that felt false, but also listening to and appreciating their joy as they share how they have come into their own authentic self. It doesn’t cast everyone whom one should have empathy for as victims, but as full human beings.

Compassion. Empathy. These are components of living well as prosocial beings. They are often missing in people who lack these abilities to see beyond their own personal life, who experience interactions with others as adversarial, who can’t see others as full human beings. People who lack empathy are antithetical to a well-functioning family, workplace or society in general.

Fortunately, the vast majority of people are compassionate and empathetic. This is human beings’ superpower, you might say.

Lookin back at 2022, what first comes to mind is the growing movement worldwide for LGBTQ+ people. As Charles Dickens continues on in his opening sentence: “it was the season of Light.” The U.S. passed the Respect for Marriage Act, replacing the old law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman, and guaranteeing that all states must recognize a marriage that is legal in the state where it was performed. In other words, the right to marry whom you love is now solidified into law.

But then Dickens juxtaposes, “it was the season of Darkness.” 2022 saw a horrendous mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs. We saw a huge upsurge in in hate speech and actions against transgender people in particular. School boards across the country removed books with positive content about being gay, and restricted transgender students’ rights to use the bathroom of their gender-identity. Many states passed laws restricting parents’ abilities to seek medical treatment or care for their transgender children.

To go back to Dickens, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” The media both promoted empathy and reduced it. Empathy is increased when we are exposed to people of different religions, ethnicities, abilities, etc. Perhaps empathy grew when Amy Schneider became the first hugely successful transgender Jeopardy champion, and millions got to know her as a person over the course of her many weeks on the show, especially  because of Jeopardy’s delightful bit where the host asks each of the contestants to relate a fun, interesting personal story/factoid.

But then there was social media, often the epitome of idiocy, sucking people down into self-feeding spirals of prejudice as they followed destructive Twitter hate-filled posts, or explored dark sites on the internet that reinforced hate toward others–not only LGBTQ+ people, but also immigrants, Blacks (see the mass shooting of the grocery store in Buffalo NY), and people of other religions (in 2022, especially against Jews.) Sadly, this too often took the form of actual violence against those who have been deemed the “other”, the enemy. We saw so many mass shootings in the U.S., often by people who have been seduced into believing that all their troubles, all their country’s troubles, are caused by those who have been deemed evil, less than human, not worthy of empathy. The Southern Poverty Law Center is currently monitoring 733 active hate groups in the U.S.

So which way will 2023 go? We can hope that the needle will swing toward a more empathetic world, and we can all do our part to further empathy in our own and others’ lives. But we know that the needle will probably continue to swing wildly. Chances are, Charles Dickens will still be relevant on Jan. 1, 2024.

When the #MeToo movement happened, a close friend put #MeToo on her Facebook page. Surprised, I asked her why. She talked about the painful and scary experience she had on her first job in a small office, when a creepy guy who worked there got too close whenever they were alone, or made lewd comments, or otherwise left her constantly on edge.

One day, a neighbor and I were sitting on my front steps talking. I don’t remember how it came up, but she revealed that her daughter had been raped. She talked about the trauma, and helped me to understand that this happens to a lot more women than we know.

What do these three women have in common? They, and thousands more like them, are empathy promoters. Everyday people, not celebrities or pundits, who bravely share their personal stories with others. We recognize them as our new Featured Empathy Promoters. (On the Home page.)

As we say in our discussion of these everyday heroes:

There will be similarities, and also individual differences, to the stories ordinary people tell, the experiences they share, which gives a depth and layer of complexity to something that is usually talked about or thought about only in generalities. There is truth in details. Adding many stories, many perspectives, gives us a bigger, clearer picture, a more empathetic view. It’s kind of like a photo mosaic. From a distance, it looks like one picture. But step in, look more closely, and you will see the thousands of tiny pictures that create the one big one.

The first steps are listening and learning. Listen to those in the “other” groups to hear what they want from allies (and it will vary from person to person–no group is a monolith; every group consists of individuals who will have some experiences, thoughts and feelings in common, and some pertinent to each person.) Learn about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of those in these “other” groups.

In other words, we start from a base of empathy. If you have empathy for another person unlike yourself, you will want to be their ally and will understand better how to do so in a respectful and helpful way.

There are lots of ways to increase our empathy for others. Learning opportunities abound. Commit to reading books that will help you understand others, including their history. The history of racist oppression/slavery; the history of slaughtering and evicting Native peoples from their land; the history of women being unable to have any legal rights without their husbands’ say so; the history of having to hide who you are (gay) and pretend to be someone you are not; the history of being distrusted and shunned and treated as “less than.” History is what the present is built on, and it has continuing impact on people today.

There are so many excellent choices in non-fiction (for example, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson); in memoirs, to get a more personal viewpoint (for example, The Yellow House by Sarah Broom); in fiction (for example, A Place For Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza). An excellent starting place is Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. As the library description says, “What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder.” Mr. Coates is a brilliant and luminous writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and is highly recommended.

Other media opportunities for increasing empathy are readily available. Many streaming series are set in other cultures; many movies feature persons of color, other cultures, LGBTQ people, deaf people, and so on. Basically, exposing ourselves often to people and groups not like ourselves normalizes their experiences and lives for us, humanizes them, and broadens the scope of our understanding.

And of course, getting to know others personally is crucial. Go to human rights meetings in your community. Visit other churches. Choose to live in mixed neighborhoods. Get to know the people you work with. Attend Pride events, and cultural celebrations in your community. Talk to the person sitting next to you at the PTO meeting at your child’s school.

We are an increasingly multi-dimensional society, and the opportunities to expand our empathy are endless.

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but today I would like to share a personal post that I put on Facebook yesterday:

Empathy asks us to keep in mind and consider both sides of the coin of otherness: we are all alike, in some ways, and we are all different, in some ways. We are all part of one group: humanity, and have in common the basic needs and traits of human beings. Generally, we all desire love and connection; generally, all cultures value family; generally, we thrive when we can do meaningful work. So maybe we start from that common base, acknowledging that those who seem “other” to us are like us in many ways, connecting in our common humanity.

And of course, each of us is an individual person, with varying life experiences, talents, personalities, and thought processes. Then add the layer of culture, and the layer of the intersectionality of those things that go into forming each  individual person, like one’s race, sexual orientation, sexual identity, age, physical body traits and so on, that all combine with whatever genetics we are born with, to create each of us.

So, if we wish to have empathy for another person, or for another group of persons, we have to keep all of these aspects of the other in our minds and our hearts. That is the premise of an organization founded in 2015 by Minneapolis writer Carolyn Holbrook called More Than a Single Story. As the Star Tribune reports, it was created “to amplify the voices of Minnesota writers of color and Indigenous writers. Its aim is also to combat the stereotypes that emerge when one person’s story is seen as ‘representative of an entire community.'”

Carolyn Holbrook has put together a new book with co-editor David Mura titled “We Are Meant to Rise.” It features almost three dozen essays and poems from a diverse group of storytellers. Book reviewer Lorraine Berry says this book is “a triumph of storytelling, a panoply of of experiences drawn from the diverse peoples of Minnesota.” As her review concludes, “Empathy for others is one way to break down the artificial barriers we construct. But getting to empathy and understanding requires that no single story be taken as the only voice that matters. While the common theme that runs through the pieces is a sort of ‘how we have lived through the past two years,’ the range of responses feels like a broadening of the world after so many months of contraction.”