Thought Dessert

At m-school, there was a day.

It was a day when we discussed the concepts of sympathy and empathy.
It was controversial.
Everybody argued for the rest of the day. They discussed it over lunch and they paraded their credentials.
They mentioned it over dinner.
And I reckon that that particular day, it was their pillow moment. It's been mine on hundreds of occasions.

Of course, like any good plot you have to know the good guys and the bad guys.
The guys that thought they were the good guys, including me, claimed empathy (although  many of them never struck me as the men in the white hats).
The bads guy merely had sympathy to offer.

Sympathy became slightly evil for me that day. They were the guys in the black hats.
Now, perhaps I think there were more human than they knew. And perhaps more honest, even underselling themselves.

Sympathy seemed to be a meagre offering to humanity. To the human in front of you.  So much worse than our best. Substandard.
It took me a while to realise that it also has its place.
In my case, that was quite a while. I still don't express it well. But I feel it and I try to act on that feeling. Isn't that the point?

I was focused on the good guy's role.

Empathy was the claim of every do-gooder. That cheapened it for me. Every doctor who wanted to go into paediatrics and psychiatry, everyone with counselling tendencies, and later on every other healthworker. Every bitch who didn't really care. Parading their home-made badges of empathy, and barely recognising the power of the concept.

I thought about this regularly for 20 years. I tossed it around, and  to be honest the thought didn't really develop or grow. There seemed to be nowhere for it to go.

But in the last two days it's occurred to me, these are just two stages of a three stage process.
Sympathy. Empathy........ Transference.

It's a broader canvas even than previously claimed.
It's increasingly poetic but increasingly dangerous.
It can eat minds.

I'm not going to offer you any answers. This is about understanding the rules.
If you haven't got it by now, this whole thing, everything, is about understanding the rules.
Understanding what's in place. Making, breaking, designing new constructs.
The rules.
Not somebody else's.
Yours.

I think as I thought 20 years ago, but for me in a slightly new way. I have the full picture now and the extremes are still invisible. Infrared, all the way to ultraviolet.

Sympathy. Empathy. Transference.

All I'm saying is, it might be nice to know in each given moment exactly where you are on the spectrum.