Compassion

La Voz de Galicia – April 2, 2021 →

Cristina PatoWe are neither who we were nor who we will become. We change constantly even though we may not realize it. We learn to be as well as we can, and to change course when we make mistakes because errors are also a part of learning. We all err at some moment of our lives, and if we are granted the opportunity to accept and assume the mistake and then rise up, this painful process will probably make us a little wiser.

But what happens when you feel you can’t make mistakes? What happens when the pressure to not do something well enough simply paralyzes you and does not let you go on? Xan and I were talking about this the other day. We were chatting about creativity and about how difficult it is to expose oneself to create or show a creative process in a world where you can’t allow yourself any errors. Today, nothing is ephemeral any longer: all you do or say remains forever, without being able to prevent it.

In addition, it seems that violent language continues to grow in the media and is taking over our lives. I don’t know whether this is related with the pandemic and the lack of a real social existence, but it seems as if we were dehumanizing ourselves to be able to automate ourselves (like banks have already done, and gas stations…). Like emotional automatons, we attack those who don’t say what what we like and praise the ones who agree with us; we allow the algorithm to tell us how we feel, and we don’t allow room to reflect about what we want to say, and why we might want to say it, and to whom. Like automatons, we do not walk in others’ shoes, we don’t cultivate empathy…we are not ourselves. And I fear that if we don’t realize soon that we are making this mistake, we will forget the meaning of the word «compassion.»

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