Empathy is medicine, and the dosage matters.
Empathy has been in the collective vocabulary spotlight for a while now. As with most words that are pushed into this spotlight, it has lost a lot of its meaning and gained a certain amount of buzziness, e-course creation, and webinar presence. While the collective certainly has much to learn and embody through empathy – I fear this time in the spotlight has watered down the essence and left us with a word that makes us roll our eyes. Empathy has lost its traction as a small, daily commitment to come to our work, relationships, collectives, and encounters with love, creativity, and patience. Like many grand words, empathy is best defined through small, intentional verbs.
Certainly, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our interdependence. Our ancestors taught us that. We are here today because of interdependence. The next 7 generations depend on how we harness togetherness and work within the collective in this generation. Empathy is core to this interconnectedness. However, as with all medicine, the quality and dosage of the ingredients matter. Over-empathying leads us to insincere gestures of service that serve no one. Under-empathying leads us to isolation and absolutism. In order to live and thrive in community, we need empathy and we also need sincerity. We need empathetic actions toward ourselves, our other than human relations, and our human relations. We can use empathy as a tool when we are at the edge of our comfort zones. We cannot use a shallow empathetic lens to overlook harms and injustice. Rather, we must first embody this medicine so when we use it, it is full, whole, and resourced. It comes down to constantly replenishing our well of resources so we can stitch together empathetic thought, action, and reactions as we build our lives alongside others.
We are often lured into urgency, and urgency often leeches off the power of empathy. With urgency we can’t see the long, empathetic process of repair after harm. We lose track of the ebbs and flows of relationships. We forget that life and earth have seasons. In urgency, we want every season to be harvest season. In empathy, we remember to listen to our ancestors. We lean back into following – rather than forcing – rhythms. We create more space for less, and less space for more.
Our medicine is to only give and receive doses of empathy that we are properly resourced to give and receive. It is to sit with the discomfort of empathy deficits, and take a long-view – knowing she will return. Our medicine is patience, as empathy is a resource that must be built, tended to, and nourished.