the compassion anthology
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    • Poetry, 2019 >
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      • Review of Claudine Nash's The Wild Essential
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      • Cynthia Atkins
      • Claudine Nash
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      • Interview with Gail Entrekin
      • Patricia Reis
      • John Nelson
      • Mary Baures
      • Monette Bebow-Reinhard
      • M.J. Iuppa
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      • Jean Ryan
      • Daniel Hudon
      • Ray Keifetz
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      • Sascha Morrell
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      • Jill Slaymaker
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      • Megan Merchant
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      • Olivia McCormack
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      • Blue Vinyl, Green Vinyl
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      • Convene
    • Winter 2015 Essays >
      • The Forgiveness Project
      • A Stranger on a Subway
      • A Journey to Compassion
      • The Question of Compassion
      • Reflections on a Childhood Deforested
      • Click, Click, Click
A Journey to Compassion

by Tam Martin Fowles

I remember my mother telling me about the day she was informed that my father, aged 38 and ravaged with cancer, was going to die. After receiving this devastating news, she had to drive the 25 miles home from the hospital to her three waiting children. At one point, unable to focus on driving, she pulled out in front of another car at a junction. The driver blared his horn and swore at her, making an obscene gesture, and she pulled in to the side of the road and cried desperate tears, afraid of attempting the rest of the journey (and the rest of her life!) in such a broken state. She cited this story as an example of why we should try to be patient and tolerant of apparently irrational behaviour. “You never know” she said, “what the other person might be going through."

Losing my father at such a young age (I was eight) made me more aware than my peers of the hidden hardships people suffered in their lives. I learned to smile when inside I was desolate. I watched my mother go through the motions of keeping a home and caring for me and my two small brothers, and I put my fingers in my ears to block out the sobs that seemed to shake the wall between our rooms at night. Sometimes I would go to her, and try to offer comfort. But her grief was too great for my small presence to absorb. It terrified me. So, in a way, did her cheerful pretence for the benefit of outsiders. I realized people are not always what they seem, that human beings are skilled at putting on a façade. I realized that The Wounded walk among us with bright smiles painted on their faces. That I was one of these Wounded, smiling brightly, and that if I smiled to hide my suffering, maybe everyone else on the planet did so too.

Forty-six years later, having worked with vulnerable individuals and groups for much of my adult life, I am grateful for this early insight into what often lies beneath the masks we wear. So many times I have met someone I judged to be poised and “together" only to find that the faultless façade hides pain, or fear, or any combination of emotions, that makes their life a warzone or a wilderness behind closed doors.

I remember once meeting a potential funder for one of the programs: tall, pinstriped, brusque and formal. He had invited me to share an idea I had about a project for young people who want to make a difference in their own lives and the wider world. This man was wealthy, influential and, to me, intimidating. He inhabited a world I couldn’t conceive, and I found him unapproachable and felt sure we had nothing in common.

I talked for a while about my idea, faltering a little beneath his perceived superiority. Afterwards a while, he looked sternly at me and said, “Can I ask you a question?” I nodded, and he proceeded, “What can I do for my daughter? She won’t eat, and she’s becoming dangerously ill. She doesn’t have any motivation for anything and I don’t know how to help her. My wife and I have tried everything.….”

The superiority – born, I suspect, of my own judgements – fell away. We were two human beings who knew suffering, and our hearts spoke a common language.
 
Scratch the surface of any human being and you will find insecurities, vulnerabilities and wounds. We have all suffered and we are all doing the best we can, given our particular set of personal circumstances. We all deserve compassion, and we all crave it, no matter how we seek to harden our exteriors and deny this fact.

My early experiences of suffering and compassion have, of course, shaped my life. I have worked with vulnerable individuals and groups for most of my adulthood, and Hope in the Heart, the social enterprise I set up in 2013, is based upon the fact that we are all survivors, and that the hardship we have faced can become the greatest catalyst for richness in our lives and the motivation to enrich the world and help others navigate their own hardships.  

At the age of nine, soon after my father’s death, a family holiday to Germany led me, bizarrely, to Belsen Concentration Camp, where I had a profound experience of belonging in this environment that was raw with grief and loss, and was inspired by the example of people who survived such devastation.  Ever since, I have had an awareness of “Exceptional Survivors”-- those who do not merely overcome suffering but transcend it to become “more” than they might have been without it. I have researched the common criteria of such people globally, and formed a model titled,  “The Accept Perspective," which pulls six criteria together as a tool to guide those in crisis towards their own transcendence.

One of the criteria is compassion, and it infuses each of the others.

We must ensure that we direct our compassion inward, towards our own hidden woundedness, before attempting to tend to the ills of the world while our own quiet desolation goes unheard. When we do this--nurturing our own bruised or broken hearts to a new level of health-- we will be ready for compassion to become a way of life, a circular flow that nourishes both ourselves and the world around us. Then we will find a quiet joy that floods the places once inhabited by pain, radiating outward, into a world where it will find its mark wherever it is needed most. 

 
Tam Martin Fowles is founding director of the UK-based organization Hope in the Heart, an organization that promotes wellbeing by illustrating the remarkable capacity of the human spirit to triumph over adversity. 
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