From “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty Is Trending” by John Pavlovitz
As we go about the work of being compassionate human beings in days when cruelty is trending, there are two wounds we need to be constantly mindful of and sensitive to: the wounds of the world and the wounds we sustain attending to them. The former are usually much better at getting our attention than the latter are. The very empathy that enables us to notice the pain in our path makes us vulnerable to injury as we travel it. It causes us to have proximity to other people’s trauma, and we cannot enter those places unscathed. The best we can do is to pay attention to the signs and mitigate the damage, and we’re going to need to slow down in order to do that. There is a stillness that is both necessary and elusive if we want to stay compassionate for the long haul.