Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling the reality of another into your own in order to fathom it. I have
It requires skill and effort. It can be taught. And it’s worth prioritizing. When we wing it, allocate little time to it or assume it’s a side effect of our work, we diminish the effort and blur our focus. “I wonder what it’s like to be you” is part of what makes us human, but
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of
“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”