Christie Smith
E
328- P1A
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own
life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must
show."
-Charles Dickens, David
Copperfield
My passion and goal in life
is to embrace my own sorrow and loneliness through embracing sorrow and
loneliness with others. My mentor, Katy,
acts as an excellent role model for this goal. With me, for example, she willingly accesses
her own feelings of loneliness and sorrow so that she can share them with me. In order to become more like her, however, there
are some things I must change about myself. The characteristic I most admire about Katy, and
would most like to adopt in my own life, is that she does not passively accept her
faults. She does not wish to simply
accept them and continue making mistakes as a result of them. Rather, she actively strives to grow and
improve herself. I want to follow her
example and aim for better in my own life, learning to fully embrace sorrow
with others.
Jane Eyre, looking rather
opinionated http://www.musicweb-international.com/film/july99/scrjuly991.htm
A
characteristic I share with Katy that sometimes prevents me from embracing
others’ sorrow is that we are both strongly opinionated women. We have not yet hit upon a subject that she
did not have an opinion on and very few that I have been silent on. This characteristic reminds me of the heroine
from the novel with the same name- Jane Eyre. She is forever expressing her opinion. As a child, after reaching her breaking
point, Jane does not shy away from sharing her opinion. She plainly tells Mrs. Reed what she thinks
of her and her children: “I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved
you, but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the
world except John Reed; and this book about the liar, you may give to your
girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I.”[1]
Later as an adult, even to the man she loves, Jane expresses her opinions,
positive or negative. For example,
consider her burst of brutal honesty in the garden when she is still convinced
that Mr. Rochester is marrying Miss Ingram: “…for you are… as good as a married
man, and wed to one inferior to you- to one with whom you have no sympathy-whom
I do not believe you truly love; for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would scorn such a union: therefore I am
better than you-let me go!”[2] Such an outburst of harsh opinion sharing is
not uncommon to me. My public criticism
of Dr. Bump’s web site is one generally humorous example. Yelling at a close friend that I was ashamed
of his actions is a much more embarrassing and serious example.
Given my
goal of sharing pain with other people, being opinionated can sometimes get in
the way. I do not wish to change that
fact about myself; sometimes, a situation desperately needs an opinionated
person to speak up (Dr. Bump’s web site).
There are times, however, when my opinions would be destructive to share
(yelling at my friend) and I would like to develop more control over my desire
to constantly share those opinions. For
example, I have a friend who occasionally has panic attacks. Her most recent one was intensified by fears
about a relationship she is in. While
she was telling me about the relationship, instead of relating to her pain by thinking about my own
relationships fears, I was thinking about her particular relationship. I, being the opinionated person that I am, was
thinking that she should set stricter boundaries in the relationship. I wanted to give her advice and tell her
exactly what she was doing wrong in the relationship. I soon realized, however, that my friend did
not need advice at that moment. In fact,
if part of her panic was based on fear about this relationship, telling her
that there was something wrong with the way she was handling the situation would
have only made her attack worse. What
she needed was someone to listen and understand and be calm in the midst of her
anxiety. As Ram Dass writes, “Most of us
know how supportive it is merely to be in the presence of a mind that is open,
quiet, playful, receptive, or reflective.”[3]
This was the kind of support my friend needed- not my opinions or advice.
What it might look like to
listen with a sympathetic imagination.
My friend
needed someone to listen and understand what she was feeling. She needed someone to empathize. In other words, she needed someone with a
sympathetic imagination. This is another
area in my life that needs improvement in order to become a person who better
empathizes with those in pain. W. J.
Bate describes the sympathetic imagination as “the ability of a person to
penetrate the barrier which space puts between him and his object, and by
actually entering into the object, so to speak, to secure a momentary but
complete identification with it.”[4] I have an ability (I believe a God-given one)
to sometimes sense what another person is feeling or going through, but whether
this is full-blown sympathetic imagination or not, I am not sure. I can usually tell what is going on with a
person, but I do not necessarily feel it myself. More often than not, my resulting emotion in
these cases is either pity, or a strong desire for them to be freed from their
negative thoughts or feelings. A better
and much more effective reaction would be to empathize with the person and
share their pain.
Me, “shielding” my emotions Authors own photograph
One step that I am taking in order to fully develop my
sympathetic imagination is getting a Liberal Arts education. In order to experience sorrow and loneliness
with others, however, I must first be able to feel those emotions for myself. There are many emotions that are unpleasant
to feel and I recognize periods in my life when I have pushed those emotions
away, refusing to feel them. This habit
creates a barrier to experiencing emotion with
others, so I
must first practice feeling. Literature
is one way to explore and experience complex emotions. In his essay “Literature and Science,”
Matthew Arnold questions, “First, have poetry and eloquence the power of
calling out the emotions? The appeal is
to experience. Experience shows that for
the vast majority of men, for mankind in general, they have the power.”[5] By studying English, I am tapping into the
power of literature to release emotions in me.
I find myself engaging with the characters in a novel or the author of a
poem much more than I ever did in high school.
This kind of emotional practice has improved my openness to feeling
similar emotions that arise in personal situations. While I am fully awakening myself to
difficult emotions, I am also learning how to feel those emotions in relation
to others. John Henry Newman in
Discourse VII of his essay, “Idea of a University,” writes, “It (a University
course) shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself
into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence
them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them.”[6] I hope that through my experience at the
Another
characteristic I would like to develop in order to better share pain with
people is the ability to put aside my own feelings in order to share in someone
else’s. An excellent example of when I
failed at this came on my high school graduation night. Before the ceremony, I had an unpleasant
dinner with my family that put me in a terrible mood. My best friend called to ask if we could meet
in the parking lot beforehand and when I arrived, she read a letter she had
written thanking me for my friendship and expressing how sad she was to know we
were parting. I, being grumpy from my
complete disaster of a celebration dinner, did not share in her sadness. I was entirely wrapped up in my own negative
emotions, unwilling to put them aside for my friend’s sake. Instead I snapped at her that I was not in
the mood to be sentimental and had a meltdown in the parking lot.
Suppose
instead, I had reacted like Romola, who, in deep despair after experiencing
betrayal by her husband and her religion, gets into a boat hoping for her own
death. She arrives on a plague-stricken
island and rather than giving in to her intense sense of self pity and pushing
the boat back out to sea, Romola responds to the cry of a child. Instead of focusing solely on her own grief,
she gravitates towards the “piteous” cry of a child. Romola, even in her disappointed and hurting
emotional state, allows the child’s cry to affect her, “darting through her
like a pain” and her reaction to the scene of the dead family is “awe and
horror.”[7] If I had responded like Romola, imagine what my
reaction to my best friend could have been.
Rather than seeing only my anger at my family, I could have shared in
the sorrow and gratitude my best friend was experiencing. We could have shared a deeply meaningful and
intimate moment together instead of the tense and hurtful moment I created.
Although
these specific goals of listening with sympathetic imagination and being
available to others regardless of my own feelings are worthy, ultimately, I
think my desire for self-improvement in itself is my most important goal. I want to be continually growing and
deepening myself like my mentor, Katy.
She tells me often of the new challenges in her life and the changes she
is making in order to better face them.
For example, after she graduated from college she spent two months at a
private retreat center focused on experiencing God through community as well as
in private study. She saw much personal
growth from this experience and seeks this same kind of transformation in her
life on a regular basis. I aspire to
continually seek personal growth so that I, not only at the end of my life, but
on a daily basis, can honestly say, “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I
have ever done.” [8]
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