During the first day of Supreme Court nomination hearing, I heard the word Empathy in Judge Sotomayor speech.
Good to hear that word. Empathy is to look from the other’s point of view, and hopefully to feel some subjective feelings as well.
Her mother, a single mother LPN who got her degree from night school, and went on to raise two successful children.
The stuff of the American Dream live from New York.
JLo watch out! The successful woman field starts getting crowded.
Judgmental people start from the right and wrong axis. It’s still miles better than prejudging.
Empathy has maturity as a prerequisite. Immature people could hardly empathize with others, since they are narcissistic at the core. Daniel Coleman says it best about empathy in his book, Social Intelligence.
He went so far to quote some studies which show that people who build great rapport could even match the other’s breathing rhythm. No wonder the shrinks get paid handsomely for “breathe-dancing” with us. It must be very exhausting after each session with different strangers coming straight in from the waiting room outside.
I would add here that friends are people who sit next to us, and see the world (and its problems) from our side.
Judges and other people sit across from us, most of the time, from up high. From their vantage point, we are very petite.
I watched Sophie Scholl two days ago. Real story of a girl on trial during Nazi time. And her last words to the court were ” one day, you will be standing where I am now”. She was beheaded a few minutes later along with her brother and co-conspirator for passing out anti-regime leaflets. The film concluded that later on, the allies dropped tons of these “letters to Munich students” before mopping up the whole Nazi regime to return Germany to its peace time as we now know it.
Empathetic or judgmental? Feeling vs moral standing. Hope we don’t have to make a forced choice every day but most of the time, we have to, when people try to lure us into their frame of reference, to seek assurance about their “judgmental” opinion of others and events. It’s up to us to invest our emotion and time on matters that maximize ROI.
Above all, keep breathing! With oxygen, we can think and feel better. It clears both our heads and our hearts.
Thang Nguyen 555 