The term "compassion" has fallen out of touch with reality, argues journalist Krista Tippett, who deconstructs the meaning of compassion through stories, and proposes a new definition, linking it with kindness, "curiosity without assumptions", empathy, forgiveness, beauty, generosity and presence.
...by not looking for happiness for our own sakes, but instead through helping others.
(Source: Richard Layard - On Happiness from The School of Life on Vimeo.)
...just for one day. Life In A Day was a historic global experiment to create a user-generated feature film shot in a single day, July 24 2010.
...to total strangers without expecting any payment in return. The BBC has interviewed a man who's done just this after his wife committed suicide 12 years ago.
She had been suffering from progressive multiple sclerosis, and when the pain and suffering became too much for her to bear, she took her own life, leading him to a suspended prison sentence - for failing to stop her - and ultimately to the decision to help others to live by doing as much as he possibly could - by giving away one of his kidneys and part of his liver, and now waiting to become a bone marrow donor...
...at any time.
We Feel Fine tries to do this, by harvesting "human feelings" from a large number of blogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).
Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written.
"Nobody foresaw the world shortage of respect"1, so compassion and empathy are perhaps our best responses to the growing realisation that even as we watch each other post and connect and feed and comment and tweet, what goes on in other people's heads is becoming ever more puzzling.
So let's find and honour and reward meaning-makers and empathisers. Welcome as they are, charters of compassion are just the start - perhaps we need open-source universities of the intimate, "where all generations can exchange experience, culture and hope".2
1. Theodore Zeldin, Intimate History of Humanity, p28; 2. Intimate History of Humanity, p31
...in many parts of the world, while we sit here blogging, tweetng, facebooking and passing the days in other, ever-novel forms of self-indulgence.
For example, in Ghana, children burn electrical components to melt off the plastic and reclaim the copper wiring - releasing toxic chemicals into the environment in the process while, in Brazil, man-made fires clear land for cattle or crops. (Thanks to Greenpeace for this salutary reminder.)
Startling as these anecdotes are, other sources such as Worldmapper can show us the bigger picture about the world we live in, by mapping the state of the world's most pressing issues, while other maps show e.g. the geographical prevalence of different diseases around the world.
...self-interest and caring for others." If true, then:
(1) What is the approximate balance between the two today - in individuals, organisations and societies? How much time do we really spend thinking about and then acting on other people's needs?
(2) How can we start an open and ongoing debate about what the balance should be - next year, in 2015, in 2030 etc? I f we don't do this, then how can individuals really know how to lead a "good" life, can organisations know what their wider responsibilities really are and can societies really know how to develop fair policies for all?
(3) How can we then best collaborate with one other, sharing our good practices and our ideas and reaching out for a consensus on the most effective actions, projects and policies to get us ever closer to that optimum balance between self-interest and active compassion?
What will be the best fora and media for involving as many people as possible in both the debate and the sharing?
Halcyon intends to play a key role in starting to answer such questions.
