“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
This is a quote by the Dalai Lama. He often speaks and writes about compassion, emphasizing the importance of having this quality when we interact with others and also in how we think about other people, including people of other ethnicities, races, religious traditions, and cultures than those with which we are familiar.
Thinking about compassion reminds me of the expression “walking in another person’s shoes.” We become more compassionate when we try to gain a sense of what it might be like to be that other person, to consider that that person has experienced difficulties and has been confronted by challenges we do not know about. And to remember that some people do not have others in their lives who care about them, that blessing that is so helpful to those of us who do.
In my work as a crisis line counselor, I try to be compassionate. I remind myself that, no matter how much the person who calls shares with me, there is still so much about her or him I do not know. This helps me not only to have compassion but also to refrain from making assumptions about the person. Too often people make judgments about others based on their perceptions of them, and those perceptions are based on limited knowledge about the life experiences of the people they are judging. Related to this, we need to keep in mind the concept of projection and to try to notice whether what we perceive about a person might be us projecting negative aspects of ourselves onto them. Although projection is an unconscious phenomenon and therefore not something we consciously do, we can be watchful of when it might be happening, especially at those times when we have strong negative feelings about the other person.
In his quote, the Dalai Lama makes an especially strong statement when he says without love and compassion humanity cannot survive. I think of his words in two ways. Humanity as a whole would end if love and compassion no longer existed, for those qualities are needed for nurturing, teaching, providing for, creating, healing—all aspects of life that are essential. His words also cause me to think about how each of us has our individual humanity. His words are a reminder for us to look into ourselves and contemplate the degree to which we have compassion and love for others.
Humanity is made up of every one of us doing what we can to make our world a better place, each of us trying to grow in the qualities that make life meaningful for ourselves and for others.