Rubber Meets The Road: Forbearance and Compassion

One of the coolest things about consistently practicing forbearance is that I get to be present with people when things get hard. By making a habit of letting go of my frustrations with the messiness of life, hopefully I’ve become a safe person for someone to be “not okay” with. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, sadly watching the people around me struggle, I get to suit up and help out. I get to practice compassion.

It’s funny, because out of all the connection-building values I’ve thought about and explored, compassion seems to be the easiest to access.  Right?  Just be nice, be kind, do random acts of kindness, pay it forward.

But the reality of compassion is a little more complicated than that. In most dictionary definitions, compassion has two parts: an awareness of someone else’s suffering and a desire to make it better. We always focus on that second part – the desire to alleviate someone’s pain. But true compassion doesn’t just try to fix things – it tries to understand them first.

How often have you been on the receiving end of a kind gesture that could not be farther from what you needed? How often have you gone out of your way to do something nice just to have it fall flat? When we have deep connections with people, our compassion is on steroids. Through a combination of vulnerability, appreciation and generosity, we can learn what can really help each other.

When I found out I was pregnant with twins, it came as quite a shock. Being identical twins, there is no familial history and I was 20 weeks pregnant before we knew. I had a 2 year old already and at the ultrasound, the poor young technician tried to console me as I wept. Everything about my future had changed. My fledging consulting business was not going to survive this. My carefully crafted birth plan had been replaced with surgery and NICU. And my body was going to be put through 4 months of insane diets and bedrest. Plus we had to buy a minivan, asap.

There were a lot of congratulations and well-wishes, which I appreciated. But the compassion that touched my heart was from the people closest to me who had really thought through what this was going to mean. They let me cry and complain. They cooked food with a very specific nutritional profile (aka meat, meat and more meat). They watched Magnolia as I went to 3 hour ultrasounds.

That compassion was real, and specific, and a beautiful expression of our community. It has sustained me even as those twins went through infancy, toddlerhood, and now a very challenging stage of childhood (You know Fred and George Weasley? Yeah, that’s not a fantasy around our house.)

Compassion is where the rubber meets the road. It’s where all the things we’ve been working on get to become reality. And it’s where the beauty of community comes into its fullness.

When has someone else’s compassionate act really helped you? When hasn’t it?