También podés leer la versión en castellano.
It’s pleasing how much of an inspiration fellow Substackers are. From reflecting on sunsets and moral shifts to understanding the value of pointless debates, my conversations with other writers on this platform have been a welcome source of ideas and material. The past week was no different. It started with a note by Eljon de Ocampo where he asked what was more inspiring: a perpetual outdoorsy summer, or a climate with four seasons.
I loved it. Primarily because it’s an open question with no right or wrong answer—those are the best questions. On a more personal plane, I’m obsessed with the yearly seasons—see Exhibit A at the bottom of this post: the non-exhaustive list of articles I’ve dedicated to the seasons. I assume Elijon is also aware that most people in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are in the middle of changing wardrobes, so it’s perfect timing to debate the matter. My vote: four seasons all the way.
The exchange happened during a lovely spring day when errands are a perfect excuse to go for a walk and enjoy the planetary cycle. It was sunny, there was a light breeze, and the temperature was just right. After leaving Elijon my answer, I got my headphones, my keys, my phone, my wallet, and headed out to scratch a few things off my to-do list.
The opening days of spring give the city a special feeling. The flâneurs exchange a hunched walk with their cold hands in their pockets for a graceful strut. The weather channels our inner Tony Manero in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever. With my headphones on, listening to some Music for adults, sauntering my way through the city, I busied myself with the underwhelming productivity pejoratively referred to as procrastination, and took care of unimportant chores—all the while, the Substack conversation about seasons lingered somewhere in my subconscious.
As I felt the embrace of the springtime sun, I recalled memories of the previous year’s Lent. In particular, a barbecue at a friend’s place—as usual, my remembrances involve food. There were about 12 or 15 of us: a mixed group of meat eaters and vegetarians, children and adults, binary and non-binary, all from a handful of nationalities. A multicultural environment that’s easy to find in a wealthy European cosmopolitan city.
One of the guests, my friend’s friend, recounted how a few evenings ago he got back home from work on his roaring Harley. He had noticed the traffic police were fining cyclists for not having lights after dusk. It smelled of police trying to meet quotas, and he was worried they’d stop him because his bike rumbled at double the permitted decibels. He was unfortunate enough to have to stop at the red light, next to the nylon-clad cyclist while they wrote her a ticket. Sitting there on 1900 cc of horsepower, there was no way he was going to escape a fine. He even caught himself already going for his wallet to get his ID. But the light went from red to green, he hit the gas, his bike rumbled forward, and he got home right in time for the game.
Later that afternoon, while the children played in the background and after the adults ate too many sausages and irresponsibly took seconds for dessert, the conversation went on over coffee. Like too often is the case, the colloquy veered toward politics. At some point, someone made a left-leaning comment to which the storytelling biker responded:
—Socialism’s a nice fairytale until you have to queue for two hours to get a loaf of bread, and have to pay for it with a wad of cash because the government can’t fit enough zeros on the bills to make up for inflation. No thanks, I’d rather live in the real world of capitalism than in a socialist utopia.
An understandable remark coming from him, a Venezuelan who had left the country almost two decades ago because of the unsustainable and violent political and economic context.
A younger me would’ve yielded to my knee-jerk reaction. Being somewhat sympathetic to cooperative ideologies as I am, regardless of the fact that I barely knew him and had no idea about his life story or his perspective, I would’ve vehemently criticized what I saw as the fallacies of his opinion. Fortunately, I’ve spent more than six years with someone from whom I’ve learned that sometimes—usually—it’s helpful to listen, so I kept my thoughts to myself and the afternoon went on amicably. As the sun set, we gathered the table, cleaned up, got all the kids sorted, said our goodbyes, went home, summer followed into autumn, autumn into winter, winter into spring, and I now wander the city recalling that day.
Being Latino, it always puzzled me how often migrants from my part of the world bring with them a conservative and capitalist zeal. I can’t understand how, coming from a region that has dearly suffered the consequences of the current structural injustices, a person can unquestioningly and fervently defend what I see as the root causes of those wrongs. As I walked down the street that spring day remembering the barbecue from a year back, it clicked.
Sure, I can turn my friend’s friend into a brainwashed, right-wing, capitalist demon who pollutes the world and disturbs the neighbors with his gas-guzzling motorcycle. I can also try to make sense of what he’s saying. After all, like all of us, he’s a person with a life experience that shaped who he is, how he thinks, and what he believes. He grew up in Caracas, living in a harsh environment, broke, and with no future prospects—trapped in what everyone told him was the socialist Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Fast forward 20 years and he has a comfortable life with a young and healthy family. He has a job he loves, and when he finishes work, he roars home on the hog he always dreamt of having when he was a kid living in South America—and assumed he would never have. Of course he’s going to defend the amorphous beast we name capitalism. His life under what’s referred to as socialism sucked in countless ways. More importantly, it yanked him away from his home, his culture, his friends, and his family.
That’s what you get when you listen to others instead of trying to convince them they’re wrong. An understanding. Packaged within the context of our lives, our opinions make a lot of sense. By listening, you can figure out why they make sense. There’s a word that describes this process of listening to understand other people’s lived experiences. I’ve been reticent to use it because it’s lost its appeal and has become rather unfashionable: empathy.
I’m not referring to empaths—people who make something about others, about themselves. We don’t need more of those. We need “empathists.” People who seek understanding and bridging the gaps between our life experiences with the goal of understanding others, and of attaining insights into their own biases and flaws. By learning about our own biases, we can understand how our lives impact others. It’s a shift that maintains that we can only be well if we are at least trying to make everyone well. This is “empathism” as an ideology. Empathy as an explicit political act.
We have a choice. We can accept the assumption that we’re a competitive species and only the fittest—more competitive—survive. Alternatively, we can join empathism and celebrate its inclusive spirit. Because everyone already is an empathist. Empathy is human nature, just as violence is. In a competitive context, violence gets us further. We do whatever it takes to survive because we either win or lose. Consequently, we’re now programmed to surface our violent nature and suppress our empathic capabilities. In capitalist terms: violence is more valuable than empathy, so we nurture violence at the cost of empathy.
However, we can create a context where empathy is valued more than violence. The revolutionary aspect of empathism is that, much like the beginner yoga class on YouTube that doesn’t require any props, everyone can practice empathy. Practicing empathy, in turn, creates the context where empathy is valued the most. It’s the virtuous cycle everyone talks about and is a mirage in the current social construct.
In other words, as a political action, empathy is a reappropriation of agency. It’s the first step toward agency. It starts with a choice that’s within everyone’s reach: either choose to negate the other’s life experience or learn from it. That first time will be difficult, but with practice, it becomes easier and leads to better results. It works much like therapy: at first, it’s hard to express how we feel, but with time and weekly practice with a costly professional, it becomes instinctive, and it improves all our relationships. With empathy, the more practice we get, the better it gets… for everyone!
Now that you’re a convert to a cult of love and understanding, go on, get out there and listen for a change! It’s one of the few things you can do that isn’t Instagramable, which means it’s probably good for you.
Hasta la empatía siempre!
What a lovely almost stream-of-conscious wandering into the seasonal changes (which I would never trade in for year-round sunshine) and to-do lists that invite procrastination (which is always a factored-in part of my creative process, I realize at this juncture of my life) and leading up to listening, and empathy. I was and still can be a knee-jerk jerk, but I find now that for my own personal sanity (under our current regime here in the upside-down-world of the USA) I need to recognize that human nature courts both kindness and violence. But let's tame our egos and greed, and take a walk in the changing seasons, and maybe smile at someone who might not think as we do.
Empathic listen,
hear our brothers,’ sisters’ hearts,
their nightmares, dreams, hopes.
...
Call for compassion,
for our/others’ flaws, faults, falls.
Empathy, humble.