Compassion In Selections From Love 2. 0 By Barbara Fredrickson

Barbara Lazear Ascher writes a well formed essay on the concept of compassion. Compassion is something that we do for others out of the kindness of our hearts. She focuses more on the poor, just how we show them sympathy, why do we do such things. Is showing empathy from our hearts or just for them to go away. I enjoyed this essay due to the fact, that she gives humanistic reasons on why people are compassionate, she doesn’t sugar coat anything, and lastly she breaks down the compassion that she sees everyday.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss (...) These people have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen” (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross). Compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern make mankind beautiful, but it also makes it defenseless . When one has concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others, he takes sacrifices, risks, and lives with uncertainty. When man is compassionate, he lives a vulnerable life. Love and compassion bring out the beauty in mankind, but they can also bring out its weaknesses. Because of man’s compassion, he

Compassion is a feeling that humans portray towards others, but you also have to act in some way to aid them and to decrease their suffering. Barbara Lazear Ascher's purpose “On Compassion” of her essay was to distinguish emotions that people feel towards homeless people. She posed the question of whether or not people feel compassion or pity towards homeless people. The thesis

In Roberta Bondi’s book, To Love as God Loves, in her own struggle with Christianity, she studies the early manuscripts and the lives of the early monastics. These writings shed light and clarity to understanding the love of God.

In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Lee evokes compassion in the audience to help them better understand the world and take action. In my opinion, authors can best evoke compassion or empathy in their audience by developing strong characters that experience conflicts. This can be seen in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and “Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.”. It is first shown in the book when Atticus is given Tom Robinson’s trial, and then again when Ms. Dubose overcomes her addiction to morphine. It is also proved in “Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.” when Robert F. Kennedy states that Martin Luther King, Jr. has been murdered.

Are people born with a complete quandary when it comes to compassion or is it something that has always been there? Barbara Lazear Ascher, born in 1946, writes, “On Compassion.” Having lived in New York City, Ascher is able to take first hand examples from the city to show the affection people have towards each other. Ascher is able to illustrate that compassion is something that has to be taught because of the adversity at people’s heels by including tone, persuasive appeals, and the mode of comparing and contrast in her essay, “On Compassion.”

“And yet, it may be that these are the conditions that finally give birth to empathy, the mother of compression. We cannot deny the existence of the helpless as their presence grows. It is impossible to insulate ourselves against what is at our very doorstep. I don’t believe that one is born compassionate. Compassion is

Empathy is an innate trait that all humans have and it is the one that we most readily feel, while compassion is a feeling that must be acquired. Ascher astutely points out that “empathy is the mother of compassion” (par.13). In this noteworthy parallel, Ascher compares empathy to a nurturing mother and compassion to the fruit of her labor. Like a mother who has an inherent instinct to protect and teach her young, so too does one have an innate understanding and sensitivity to the feelings and experiences of another, and it is only from these life experiences that the birth of a new awareness is brought forth in the form of compassion. Similar to a mother’s tutelage, Ascher describes compassion as a “learned” behavior that allows one to consciously act upon the distress of others by actively alleviating it. According to Ascher, “Compassion is not a character trait like a sunny disposition. It must be learned, and it is learned by having adversity at our window…” (par.13). In other words, true compassion can only be learned when one is faced with it every day of ones life and that once it becomes “familiar”, only then it can become identifiable and conjure empathy.

Ascher’s essay describes the ways she has seen compassion showed, through voluntary donations, food, shelter. She openly questions what drives humans to be compassionate to each other. As a successful author who

Happiness is a euphoric state, it is the light at the end of the tunnel, it is what individuals seek to achieve. Human beings inherently want to be happy. Happiness is unique because it has seven billion different definitions. In his book Immune to Reality, Daniel Gilbert argues that individuals are only as happy as the subconscious function of their brain allows them to be. Additionally, he questions the state of happiness by citing the psychological immune system. The psychological immune system is a subconscious process of the human brain, which favorably rationalizes human decisions whether they were right or not, regardless of outcome it always finds something favorable to take away. In Barbara Fredrickson’s Love 2.0, she introduces the vagus nerve as a biological apparatus to increase loving potential; Fredrickson links higher levels of loving potential to increased overall health. Most importantly, Fredrickson establishes the relationship between love and happiness as an interdependent one, “Having at least one close relationship like this is vital to your health and happiness” (108). Fredrickson believes that humans have the power within them to biologically alter themselves and to shape their own identity. Inversely, Malcolm Gladwell proclaims that human identity is shaped by the environment an individual is subject to in his book The Power of Context. Gladwell affirms that humans have the power to shape their identity, however only by changing the

Compassion is a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering (Dictionary.com). In the Annex you can see that many people are very compassionate towards each other. One example of this is when Peter’s cat gets lost and cannot be found. You’d expect for him to get told to suck it up and that it’s just a cat, and they’ve more important things to worry about. Instead of this you see that they try to find his cat and calm him down, which I think is very compassionate of them to think of Peter and how much he loves his cat instead of telling him to suck it up.

Within literature, Compassion has been described in many ways though very few descriptions have agreed on how it is best identified (Volpintesta 2011). Crowther et al (2013) describe compassion as a deep emotion that is felt by the individual practitioner allowing them to understand what the patient may be experiencing. Nussbaum (2003) argues that compassion goes beyond just understanding and identifying that emotion, it requires the practitioner to produce a response to the feeling or emotion in order to improve the situation. Dewar (2011) points out that compassion is not only about the recognition of the patients suffering but includes small

Compassion can change lives and it can change

Compassion allows humans to grow and have a hopeful future. In Hiroshima, Mr. Tanimoto showed compassion by urging people to get on a boat to safety. The victims were too weak to get on the boat. However, being selfless, Mr. Tanimoto helped the injured people get on it. This is significant because Mr. Tanimoto assisted the weak people to get on the boat to safety so they’d heal. Thus, through Mr. Tanimoto’s compassion the victims had a hope they’d survive. Furthermore,

If you’re not paying attention, the mind can be a tricky labyrinth. The less you know about it, the more inexplicable and frightening it becomes. For example, why do seemingly benign elephants wreak havoc upon villages? In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert explores the aberrant nature of these elephants and correlates them to their traumatizing upbringing, deprived of community and kinship. The biochemistry of the human mind, analyzed in “Love2.0” by Barbara Frederickson, serves as a worthy addendum to Siebert’s conjecture. “Love2.0” explains that the brain, hormones, and nerves work in unison to build emotional fortitude, stimulate oneself, and express positivity resonance. Siebert’s ideas of elephant culture and trans-species psyche can put Frederickson’s theory of emotions into practice. The absence of certain hormones within elephants, provided their fragmented community, can explain their volatile outbreaks. Alternatively, the reinstitution of human parental roles into elephant culture can help reconstruct their broken emotional states of elephants and rebuild their resilience; this healing process can also extend to humans.