Read

March/April 2005 Editor's Blog
From the Editor: Life, death and compassion

Miriam Knight

I sense that books are an emanation of the global consciousness. It is interesting how they seem to come out in clusters around a given topic, often when they are most needed. As I was keeping vigil with my mother during her final illness, I received two books for review that caught my eye. The first was Unattended Sorrow: Recovering from Loss and Reviving the Heart, an insightful book by Stephen Levine, one of the foremost experts on grief and dying. Levine suggests that when we grieve, we fuel the pain by projecting on to the situation all our unreleased hurts and regrets bottled up from the past. Rather than being fully present for the loved one, we are projecting ahead and feeling sorry for ourselves. This was such an object lesson in being fully present in the now! I actually passed this book on for review to one of the wonderful hospice workers, who was dealing with her own grief issues. I can personally attest that those people involved in end of life care are angels walking amongst us.

Then I got Forever Ours to review (see feature story). Shortly after my mother’s passing last month I was privileged to spend several fascinating hours with its author, forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio. If ever one needed reminding that death is just a transition of state, one couldn’t ask for more convincing evidence than Dr. Amatuzio’s stories and experiences. What perfect timing it was.

The conviction of the continuance of life after death was also some small comfort in contemplating the horrendous death toll of the tsunami. I find it more painful to imagine the utter shock and despair of the survivors who lost everything. Compassion means "suffering together", and the continuing outpouring of support, even though the stories have fallen off the front pages shows that we are still "suffering together" with them and want to help in any way we can (see Community Stars). But I would suggest that compassion is not just suffering together, it is laughing together too. We can take a lesson from the baby on the cover of this issue. Her spirit is unclouded by the traumas she just survived. Now is the only thing that counts, and her delight at making a new friend of the photographer spreads through the crowd like sunshine.

Compassion is the theme of another extraordinary book, Field Notes on the Compassionate Life – A search for the soul of kindness by well-known author Marc Ian Barasch. This is an important book that will, I believe, give great impetus to the emerging paradigm.

Barasch set out to investigate whether compassion is a learned behavior or hardwired into our nervous system and genetic code. He examines such fascinating questions as: How do we open our hearts to those who do us harm? What if the great driving force of our evolution were actually "survival of the kindest?"

What were his conclusions? I’ll give you a hint. He closes the book with the following anecdote:

When Aldous Huxley was dying, he was asked what he had learned from all of his experience with his spiritual teachers and gurus and through his own spiritual life. He said, "It's embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder."

Personally, I think compassion is the essence of love, and its manifestation is kindness.

Blessings
Miriam