Simon Friedman
Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that Simon Friedman has won our essay contest on the theme Family with his piece "The Limits of Compassion."
I am a faculty member at UMKC, who likes to write as a way of pondering philosophical questions, and as a way of amusing myself and others. I have previously been a winner of Science Magazine's "Visions of the Future" essay contest and have had creative work published by Nature Chemistry (Essay: "The Four Worlds of Carbon") and the Medical Literary Messenger (“The Inoculation”). Recently I was a winner of the Ulysses/Disney writing competition for my piece “My Nemesis: The Finder”. In addition, my films (written/directed) have been featured at multiple NYC and Chicago Food Film Festivals where they were named “Best of the Decade”.
The Limits of Compassion
My mother was a remarkable woman, and I wish you could have met her. People who did would occasionally say things to me like “you can tell she is one of those special people”. And I would feel pride that they had noticed. What made her special? To start, she was wise, kind and compassionate. Sometimes the depths of her compassion surprised me: Years ago, we both read an article in the New York Times about families in Appalachia who kept their children out of school and prevented them from learning how to read. The purpose of this approach was to insure the children would be labeled by the state as “Disabled” which would increase their welfare support. My reaction to this was something like outrage, for a variety of reasons: the abuse of the children, the abuse of the System, the loss of human potential. My mother’s response however surprised me: “It is sad that they see this as their best way to survive in the world.”
Her interpretation was not that this was a moral failing, but rather was a kind of logical conclusion that derived from their circumstances. Even today I don’t completely know how to understand her reaction. It is somewhat paradoxical as well, because my mother could be very judgmental too. One of her stock phrases was “If I were you I wouldn’t start from here”, that she would dispense to any number of figures in the news or closer to home. The implication being “yes, you have a problem directly in front of
you now, but your mis-step took place long in the past.”
She had a survivors critical and strategic eye. How do you navigate a world in which strangers will steal your clothing, or a foster mother will steal your money, or war will separate you from your family at age 12? The answer is, she became observant and strategic, and she thought things through in advance. What she didn’t do however was become cynical, suspicious and bitter, which could easily have been her response. She was the opposite of those things. But why? I think it is because in the middle of
the challenges of her childhood, she had enough positive interactions with caring people to remind her that “yes, goodness still exists, somewhere, in the world”. And how important those positive interactions are. I think it is for this reason that she always
allied herself with the vulnerable, like those folks in the New York Times article.
The positive interactions in her young life came from multiple places: There was the aunt (also a refugee) who rescued her from her dysfunctional foster family. There were kindly teachers who recognized and encouraged her talents. There was the owner of the house where the aunt worked as a maid, who allowed my mother to live in the house as long as she helped out. I always felt that at some point she understood the importance of those acts, and she became the giver of them as well as the recipient. She would talk about those questionable psychology experiments from the 1950s where they saw the development of psychological disorders in monkeys that had no mother, but how a simple bundle of wire, vaguely mother-shaped that the young monkey could cling to, could help it develop normally. The lesson was clear: it often doesn’t take much, at the least make a wire bundle for someone who needs it when you can.
As I said she was also paradoxically very tough but mostly with herself, stoically persisting through challenges and hard times without self-pity. So how do you transfer that skill to your children, the idea that hardness is sometimes required in life, while at the same time remaining compassionate? It can be a thin line to balance on. Mostly it was by example. But every now and then it came in the form of an indirect lesson. We were talking on the phone one evening and I was complaining about something in my life that was depressing me, as happens with me sometimes. At some point I said, partly in jest:
“I don’t think you appreciate what it’s like to be moody…” and she responded:
“I didn’t have the luxury to be moody…”
I let out a sharp laugh. But I’ll admit, that response brought me up short. I felt some measure of shame and sorrow: as a child she couldn’t fall inward. The external circumstances of her situation were all-consuming and would not allow it. Perhaps I was moody because I could be. Had she survived intact because she wasn’t? Or had the real difficulties of her experiences inoculated her against false difficulties? Was I engaging in false difficulties because my relatively peaceful life circumstances had removed most of the real difficulties? I had the luxury to be moody and to draw inward. Is that a luxury that you would wish on your children? Or would you wish on them deprivations so that they would be better prepared for the deprivations that life will happily dispense? In the intervening years since that conversation and her death, I’ve pondered the meaning of that conversation and tried to come to some conclusions. Perhaps the numerous unanswered questions posed above will give you an idea of how successful I have been in this endeavor.
The best I can come up with is that there are limits to everything in this life, energy, time, and yes even compassion. But it is a tricky balance and it is rarely obvious which side of the line you are on, either when dispensing or receiving compassion. There can be times when the compassionate thing to do is to simply tell the truth, no matter what it sounds like: “I didn’t have the luxury to be moody”. That was the truth, and there was no way of getting away from it. What to do with it was, and is, now up to me.