“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
These words by the Dalai Lama express how essential our ability to love and our ability to be compassionate are. I’m thankful that many people have these qualities. And I’m concerned that there are people who do not—or who are very limited in their ability to love and to have compassion.
There are many influences on people’s emotional and psychological development as they grow from infancy to adulthood. As children, we are influenced by the other people in our lives, especially by our parents. And over time by other family members, teachers, and various adults whom we see on a regular basis. Additional influences are our physical environment, life experiences—both expected and unexpected—and our genetic makeup, among others.
When we are treated with love and compassion as babies and during the childhood years, those virtues are much more likely to become a part of our nature throughout our lives. Love and compassion also grow in us when we see, hear, and read about other people modeling these qualities.
I have the good fortune of living just a few miles from my nine-month-old grandson, and therefore I’m able to be with him every few days. It has been a joy to see how he’s changed between each visit—so much happens in the early years of childhood. He started crawling not long ago, and I can see how fun it is for him to have that ability to move about and explore. It has also been a joy for me to see his smiles. They are the smiles of a little one who is loved. And there are many other children who are loved. But some children are born into situations where their parents are limited in their ability to feel and express love and compassion. This is often because their parents did not experience this type of nurturing themselves. It is especially for children in these situations that we need to both have compassion and to model loving kindness in our words and actions.
As the Dalai Lama says, without love and compassion humanity cannot survive. We all are part of helping humanity not only to survive but to thrive. When we grow in consciousness, our ability to love and to be compassionate also increases. By remembering that our words and actions have an effect on others, especially on children, we can be more watchful of what we do and say. This is true whether our words and actions are directed toward a certain individual or whether they are observed by others. And that observation is often by children when we aren’t even aware of it.
Let us all do our part to add to the love and compassion that are in our world.