On Kindness and Courage
Compassion entails bravery.
Every day, at about a quarter past six, I walk to the local gym. It is usually fairly quiet in my area at this time, more so on weekends. And this past Saturday, as I ambled over, I heard someone screaming, ‘Help! Help!’ and saw, at the end of the road, a woman running at full tilt in my direction.
I did not know what was going on. There was even a small part of me that thought this might be some kind of ruse (this is not pure cynicism: there is a local woman who is known for pretending to be hurt before robbing people). Anyway, on this occasion, I took out my headphones, hastened towards the woman, and soon she reached me.
‘Are you O.K.?’ I asked.
I heard someone screaming, ‘Help! Help!’ and saw, at the end of the road, a woman running at full tilt in my direction.
After catching her breath, she proceeded to tell me that she worked at the hospital nearby and saw two men trying to break into a car. When she confronted them, they stepped aggressively towards her, slapped her hot coffee out of her hand, and told her they were going to smash her phone. She was petrified.
Now this woman cannot have been much taller than five foot. She was slight. She had probably just come off a long, probably overnight shift at the hospital for a coffee. I strongly suspected she was a nurse, a job that (it goes without saying, really) requires enormous reservoirs of kindness, patience and energy. And seeing two men breaking into a car she did not own, on a street on which she did not live, she felt compelled to intervene. What compelled her?
Seeing two men breaking into a car she did not own, on a street on which she did not live, she felt compelled to intervene.
I found myself reflecting later that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin, or at least more closely connected than we tend to think. Courage implies fear. In fact, it requires fear. There is nothing brave about doing something that doesn’t scare us. Bravery manifests in being afraid to do something and doing it anyway. Though what scares us may not truly amount to a threat to our physical safety, our body screams at us that it is. At the level of the nervous system, then, to act bravely is always to risk serious harm or worse.
It follows from this that in order to act bravely there must be something we hold to be more important than our well-being. This may not be explicit to us: we do not necessarily know what our values are, yet act them out regardless, on instinct or by habit. But we have them nonetheless. For some (the cowardly) the highest value might simply be self-preservation. For others, it might be personal growth. For others still, it could be courage as such, by which I mean facing up to fears ‘just because’.
In order to act bravely there must be something we hold to be more important than our well-being.
And for others, it will be compassion. If we truly want to lesson others’ suffering then we are bound to set aside our own safety and do what we feel is right. I am always moved by the story of St Maximilian Kolbe, who offered his own life to save another during the Holocaust. But it takes courage just to stand up to someone whose actions will make someone suffer.
And courage goes goes beyond the physical. It takes enormous courage just to confront the suffering of others day after day, as nurses do — to be brought face to face with pain and misery and carry on — not least because we are required to open ourselves up to that pain, to feel it ourselves, to ‘suffer with’ — the literal meaning of the word ‘compassion’.
It takes enormous courage just to confront the suffering of others day after day, as nurses do.
It is brave, too, to speak up for those on the fringes of our world, particularly when it entails challenging popular opinion or authority, or forcing others to confront their indifference, which can elicit a defensive or even hostile response (none of us wants to think we are a bad person). It is brave to forgive those who have wronged us, since some part of us fears that if we lose our anger we will lose our self-respect.
So what compelled that short, slight woman to stand up those two thieves (or, thanks to her intervention, would-be thieves)? I could be hopelessly wrong, but there was something about her—the way she talked, perhaps, or something in the way her face, though fearful, seemed to shine with kindness—that made me feel it was compassion. The actions of those guys would have caused someone disappointment or frustration or anger or sadness—in other words, pain. And this woman didn’t want that for them.
