Empathy

Sunday morning brought the sound of a loader leveling the lot behind my house. Those who have visited me here will share my surprise at this, given, one, that I am surrounded by miles of unoccupied land, and two, that people who choose to live in places like this (off-grid, primitive) don’t generally want to live so close to someone else. I thought I was safe from neighbor incursion at least for a decade or so, but alas.

I will need to change my route for my attention walk. I can’t bear to walk by this:

This havoc happened in just eight hours or so. I’m mindful that such destruction often arrives in just a moment, the destruction of whole worlds, from the personal to the micro, the death of someone we love, the obliteration of an ecosystem, the bombing of a neighborhood.

To stop the glum train, I turned my attention to birds. They are back again from wherever they spent the few cooler months. This pair of red shafted flickers (thanks Dan for the ID) came by Buddy’s Bar for a drink:

They were here last season, and I’m delighted they’ve returned.

I also went to Tingley Beach in Albuquerque, enjoying hissing geese, squawking ducks, and cooing pigeons, and, understandably, people feeding them all with no regard for the “Please do not feed the birds” signs ringing the pond.

I watched two white mallards walk from the pond to a nearby log where a pigeon was already napping. The female began her self-cleaning process, the male watching me and murmuring nervously, or so it seemed to me. The female cared little, whole-heartedly plucking and nuzzling beneath wings and tail, a tuft of down clinging to her bill. Amid the chaotic city sounds and the bird cacophony, I thought about this pair’s adaptation to urban life and the relative simplicity of their days, traveling baggage-free. I wondered, briefly and impossibly, what it’s like to be a white mallard and that free—materially, emotionally, mentally. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a now famous (for philosophy) essay titled, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He argued that even if we could know all the objective facts about bats (what they eat, how they fly, what it’s like to use echolocation, etc.), we still wouldn’t know what it is like to be a bat, from the bat’s experience of being a bat. His point was and is important for epistemological questions—and I won’t go into a long lecture about that—but to return to the white mallard pair, I tried imagining their lives but I can’t know what it’s like to be them (even with VR goggles), and I can’t know what it is like to be any of the other people I saw at Tingley Beach fishing, walking loops, chasing toddlers, and staring off into the water. I shouldn’t pretend to know, let alone believe I know what their lives are like from their experience, but the acts of knowing, categorizing, reducing, dismissing, assuming, and such are quite different from the necessary act of empathy: imagining, attending, asking, reaching out, listening, inviting another being to share what it’s like to be who they are.

And it’s not just people who can communicate this. All the birds of Tingley Beach said so much and all at once I missed more than a few announcements concerning the general state of affairs. In the last week we’ve had some huge, raging windstorms. The trees are blossoming. Rains left rivulets in the arroyos. My dog’s breath this morning smelled pleasantly (and strangely) of juniper.

Empathy is a powerful act of inviting all this in while simultaneously “going out” from behind the protective distancing devices I have in place as shields. Sometimes I can’t do this, like when I am just overloaded by catastrophe, a horrendous news cycle, or personally at low ebb, but for the most part, I believe empathy to be one of our human strengths, should we choose to nurture it, and the precursor to every revolutionary act of love.

I’d rather not feel pain, but empathy isn’t a selective act, choosing only to connect with the good. The disruption and sadness and loss this back lot now engenders in me are unwelcome feelings, but that’s part of practicing empathy. So, with resolve, I will continue to follow the same route I’ve been taking on my attention walks, inviting what this destruction may teach. I don’t want to give in to pessimism, apathy, or misanthropy, all occasional guests I’ve entertained in my mental house. It takes a lot of energy to keep them at bay.

My thanks to the birds, especially the white mallard pair. I’m glad I went to Tingley Beach. I feel strengthened, chastened, open. What a brutal and beautiful world we share.