The Heart of Compassion

I took an on-line personality test last week, the results of which turned out to be pretty interesting. One of the points that struck me as being particularly true for me was that individuals of my personality type "have the ability to see the good in almost anyone or anything." I do believe that we can't know for sure what is in someone else's heart. We only know what they choose to reveal to us through their words or actions, and we have no way of knowing their true motivations.

With few exceptions, everyone is just doing the best they can. Few people intend to purposely hurt us out of some evil intention. For the most part, everyone is more concerned about themselves and their own problems than they are about other people.

The world isn't all black and white, good and evil. There are myriad shades in between, constantly changing, and I believe the ability to see those shades, to empathize with almost anyone, is a gift. It makes things difficult sometimes, of course. It makes it hard to work up a lot of righteous anger over someone's perceived mistreatment of me (even here I must put in the word "perceived," because everything I experience is colored by my perceptions, my beliefs and background and feelings and maybe even the weather or what I had for lunch).

On a bad day, certainly, I'm as likely as anyone else to blow up at the traffic, or an inattentive salesperson, or a coworker who seems to have no regard for the work I've spent the day creating. But I try to remember that everyone else has worries and concerns just like I have, and they are likely to be concentrating on those concerns rather than on me. I try to have compassion and understanding, and by trying to see the situation through the other person's eyes, realize that their bad humor is rarely directed at me personally.

A personal philosophy that there are at least two sides to every story also makes it difficult to have satisfying arguments. Although I have strong opinions about many things, I understand that not everyone has the same beliefs I do, and I believe that their position is just as valid as mine. And I'm not very good at arguing, anyway. My beliefs tend to be more "felt" than thought out, things that I feel in my heart are right, rather than positions that I can defend with logical arguments.

People may be unthinking, they may be insensitive, but they are rarely malicious, or at least in my experience I believe that to be the case. Everyone is the center of his or her own universe, and sometimes our inclination is to act as if everyone we come into contact with is simply orbiting around us, with their actions affecting us directly, either to our benefit or detriment. If we go through life with the realization that everyone is their own universe, with their own story, and that we each are responsible for our own happiness, our lives will be much more joyful.

Let us not hold ourselves above our fellow human beings, no matter how great the disparity. To withhold your scorn is already beautiful. To see how we are all of one family is compassion.

Deng Ming-Dao, "365 Tao (Daily Meditations)"

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If you would like to take the personality test I took, the URL is listed below, along with a link to the profile which supposedly describes my personality (it's pretty accurate, actually). I'm not going to tabulate the results of this test like I did with the Kingdomality test, mostly because this one is a lot more personal. If you want to let me know what you find out, though, I'd be extremely interested.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter
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