Shift

Shift: 

empathy is a shift that's so often unexpected, not something that we might wish for in certain situations as it shakes us from our normal point of view and causes us to see the world anew. My own recent experience concerned a certain political figure that I've longed disliked and dismissed as a danger to the country - and yet somehow during a recent news clip I was overcome with an understanding of what it must be like to be this person, having a deep sense of how he was trapped within his own condition mind without any possibility of knowing any other way to experience the world. I very much felt the emotional entrapment of this person, layers of pain and conditioning since earliest childhood that keeps him in such narrow confines of how he's able to express himself. 

it was an awakening of sorts, and yet one I wouldn't necessarily wish for.

empathy, this deep shift in my own understanding, has now seems to have given me a choice. Do I continue to dislike this person after having the experience of his limited ability to navigate his inner world?

 Or is there really a choice here? 

yes, empathy caused a shift within me, and with it came a true sense of compassion, and even an unbidden and totally surprising feeling of love. Yet he remains a danger, he's still trapped in an emotional void of choices, almost always wrong in his response to others. Empathy doesn't change the present situation - it  only changes my own response, and that it now provides me the option of acting with compassion. 

so it's not a choice at all.

not really. 

compassion is the core of what we are.

even if it's deeply hidden.

buried through a lifetime.

my empathetic shift in my own conditioning caused me to remember this compassionate response, it's not a choice, I can't help but to see this person differently now, replacing my former dismissal with love and a heartfelt wish for his own experience of empathy. But it doesn't really matter, it was never truly about this person. It's my view that's been changed, this shift towards an unexpected sense of  love and compassion.

and with this, however slightly...

everything has shifted.