Too little
A useful weakness
Their distress is their problem; it helped me win.
Competitive advantage crowds out concern for the person experiencing the loss.
Compassion
Notice the person having a hard time, even across the contest.
A caring responsiveness to suffering, guided by respect for the person affected.
Compassion responds to another person’s suffering with concern for that person. A competitive setting can narrow attention until distress appears only as an advantage or an inconvenience. Compassion opens it again. It asks what help might be welcome, without assuming that every disappointment needs an audience, a lesson or immediate repair.
Compassion gives company that leaves room for disappointment
Your squash opponent has lost a match they badly wanted to win. They sit beside their bag, still holding the racket. You begin to offer a bright account of all the good things that losing can teach, then notice how much it resembles a speech you would prefer not to hear. You ask whether they would like some company or a little space. They choose company. For a while, the match does not need a moral.
Finding the balance in Compassion
After a painful sporting defeat, a participant offers company while letting the disappointed player decide what is welcome.
A fitting response
A simple offer
Would company help, or would you prefer some space?
Concern takes a practical form while leaving control with the recipient.
Pursued too far
The compulsory rescue
I must cheer them up before I leave.
The helper’s wish for a good outcome becomes pressure on the disappointed person.
A caring response can be complete before the other person feels better.
What Compassion makes possible
Compassion helps participants remain people to one another when results separate them. It can also make it easier to notice distress hidden by sporting routines: the player left out, the volunteer overwhelmed, the opponent being mocked. The response may be quiet, practical or shared with someone better placed to help. It need not become a claim to know exactly what another person feels.
Compassion in ordinary life
A forgotten invitation
Check whether someone left on the edge of a group wants to join before deciding that solitude means rejection.
When a joke changes
Stop adding to a joke when the person at its center is plainly distressed, even if your side finds it funny.
Nearby virtues, different work
Courtesy
Courtesy supplies ordinary consideration; Compassion responds when suffering makes a particular need visible.
Perspective
Perspective helps you see whose experience has disappeared behind your own view of the event.
Compassion and its counterfeits
Public pity
A conspicuous display of concern can make someone’s embarrassment larger.
The instant lesson
Explaining how a loss will improve someone may protect you from having to sit with their disappointment.
How to cultivate Compassion
Describe what you have noticed without claiming to know the whole experience.
Offer a specific, modest form of help and accept the answer.
Consider whether privacy would be more useful than public attention.
Try it today
In an ordinary setting, offer a small kindness to someone who might welcome it. Make refusal easy and let their response guide what follows.
Questions worth returning to
- Whose need is my proposed help serving?
- Can I offer something useful without requiring a grateful response?
Keep the practice proportionate
Respect refusal and privacy. Serious distress or immediate safety concerns call for suitable support; a teammate need not manage them alone.
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
I studied my various kind teachers with much care. One was so helpful that but for my protest she would fairly have carried me in her arms, and the bicycle to boot, the whole distance.
Frances E. Willard · A Wheel within a Wheel · My Teachers
Willard humorously describes a helper so eager that she would carry learner and bicycle together. Care needs to notice the recipient’s wishes; doing more is not always helping better.
But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places?
William James · Talks to Teachers and to Students · What Makes a Life Significant
James asks limited understanding to make us more cautious with other people. After a loss, asking whether company would help respects a disappointment whose full meaning we may not know.
…certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big.
William James · Talks to Teachers and to Students · What Makes a Life Significant
James links taking delight in other lives with seeing more of what matters. Caring about a teammate includes their particular hopes, rather than only how their mood affects the team.
When the city lay in waste and ruins, and thousands of souls were suffering, our hearts were touched and we gave liberally to that same city where we were actually denied the privilege to buy and pay for food and hotel accommodations.
Marshall W. “Major” Taylor · The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World · Chapter 90
Taylor and his wife helped people suffering after the San Francisco earthquake, remembering that the city had denied their family food and lodging because of race. The account describes their chosen generosity across injury; it does not make such giving a debt owed by anyone mistreated.
A man without ever the least appearance of anger, or any other passion; able at the same time most exactly to observe the Stoic Apathia, or unpassionateness, and yet to be most tender-hearted…
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations · Book I · VI · Meric Casaubon translation
Marcus finds tenderness compatible with steadiness in Sextus. The older Stoic language of freedom from passion need not become emotional coldness toward a person who has just lost.
The guard, who is alone with him on the back of the coach, is silent, but has muffled Tom's feet up in straw, and put the end of an oat-sack over his knees.
Thomas Hughes · Tom Brown’s School Days · The Stage Coach
On Tom’s cold journey to school, the guard notices his discomfort and offers simple protection. The quiet action gives care a specific object; it does not demand a grateful performance from the boy.
By all means let us preserve the safety of the home, but let us also make safe the street in which the majority of our young people find their recreation and form their permanent relationships.
Jane Addams · The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets · The Wrecked Foundations of Domesticity
Addams moves concern beyond the private home to the places where recreation actually happens. Care in sport includes noticing whether a shared space lets people participate without avoidable harm.
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Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.