Empathy is often confused or misunderstood to mean sympathy mixed with compassion – as to prevent the sympathy from being too sympathetic, pitying the state of another’s life, or being kind while regarding another human being. When I sympathize, I feel bad for the state of another’s circumstance; when I empathize, it is because I too have similarly lived, not just similarly suffered. Empathy can be shared only when experiences between one and another are exceedingly aligned. When we speak of and encourage empathy, this definition is shifted to the intentional choice walking in the proverbial shoes of another person. If I deliberately call back or reactively remember the pangs of an injury or tragic emotional loss, I can extrapolate. Reactively and genuinely, I wince, feeling the carried scars, offering you my heartfelt condolences. This is knowing what it’s like to have lost a love or a loved one. Memories and experiences determine a capacity for empathy, yet any memory is not just an experience by itself. Memory can be a euphoric concoction of emotion, insight, detail, transience, spanning all hues of the human condition.
Empathy shades our perspectives. While imagining a mutual experience, as you relate to me a once-lived sense of awe, a potential and capacity to express empathy grows. There, two people surpass divisions of time.
Considering the number of enthusiastic travel recommendation that we all tend to receive, travel is often a highlight within the lives of many. Sharing destinations can be a very happy empathy. It really isn’t empathy until I, too, have been dumbstruck by the same grandeur – a congruous flooding of the mind. It’s a metaphorical inference via a vicarious experience, much like a reply within a compelling conversation. “Me, too!” is almost always somehow spoken within that space. Like travel, people usually prefer the varieties near serendipitous smiles, vis-à-vis, and better still, vie à vie. I myself must be stunned by the ever-sought and elusive sense of awe to be able to seek those same mentally-tread grounds. If anything is indeed valid and real: it’s all in what you think.
Trading stories among travelers is sometimes how hidden gems are kept hidden, but it’s also how they’re discovered. Much like empathy, a common point of reference is required if those spiritually-magnetic points are to function as intended.
I never would have seen the catacombs of Paris if I hadn’t listened to a French professor’s recommendation for an in-depth tour of the city after discussing some of the city’s graveyards where great names now rest.
Many people find the number of bones in the catacombs to be unsettling, so tours are normally less than an hour. Our guide’s deep dive lasted an afternoon. The air underground can be a welcome break from the summer sun in an inner-city, cooled further by the sadness of millions of people held in the catacombs. Astonishing to imagine that a similar sense of awe is in some way tied to every friendly travel recommendation that has ever been given in humanity’s history, and in some way, every funeral, if awe can be acknowledged as sometimes both good and bad. Empathy for the millions of past lives now buried beneath the streets of Paris and the somber catacombs themselves can be opposite sides of a coin cast from a single metal.
The catacombs feel even more profound when it is held in mind how easy such labyrinths might be to miss while milling about on the topside of Paris, just a few meters away, vertically, from the streets. Without the professor’s recommendation, I wouldn’t have managed a photograph of a group of human skulls, of unknown origin or vintage, which had been curiously arranged in the form of a heart to frame the faces of our childhood friends who stood on either side. Shocked into awe reactively at these sights, we had smiled at the histories shared in by tour guides. This paradox formed in front of a wall composed of stacked femurs within the subterranean conduits of the city herself. A photograph can also be a memory of where many, still living, can choose for a moment to unite, pausing before passing. Empathy is experiential only if experience can be felt.
Neogeneses 