The Weight of Compassion

"On Saturday and Sunday he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths of the future. On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of which he had never known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with it. For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one´s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.¨ - Milan Kundera

And weight gives substance to life. Weight makes us kneel down on the earth and smell the decomposed spirits being born again into the soil. Microscopic smiles. Microscopic laughter. Microscopic tears. All beneath our feet. One cannot know what it is to be human -- to have hands, eyes, mouth, blood, emotion - if she does not know compassion. When I read an informational text - a book written with the intention of teaching me specific formulas, specific histories, specific perspectives - I gather information, yes; I learn. But compassion is not as alive and awake in an informational text as it is when I read a novel, a story, an ethnography, a poem, a human cry. Breathing in more than words; making connections; feeling the pain, the ecstasy of another person on the journey of being human -- this is learning. I am here in Guatemala to swim in stories, in buzzing human sounds, in rivers of tears, in pools of blood, in coffee cups of laughter, in experiences, in personal connection. I want to feel compassion. I want to feel the weight -- a weight that I will distribute through my body, mind and spirit - deepening my being with its profundity. Compassion grows into strength grows into courage grows into love grows into peace. Anthropology is opening your doors to compassion. If you cannot feel, you cannot understand the stories. I want to understand the stories. I want to listen. Compassion.