Compassion Is For Everyone, Not Just Those We Agree With: Part 2

Compassion Is For Everyone, Not Just Those We Agree With: Part 2

Time to share a story with you dear community. As a follow up to my previous post, I’m sharing about a time in which it took reaching into the pit of my stomach to pull out compassion for someone who was causing me active harm. The result was surprising and I could feel the discomfort of new neural pathways sprouting like roots from a tree starting to grab onto a new sense of how the world works. Like many people, when someone wrongs me, I want them to know it and I want them to be punished because we are taught punishment is justice and closure. But punishment is not accountability.

I have a sense of continuity in living in the same house and neighborhood as my grandparent. This is the house in which my grandparents envisioned their life together. Tragically my grandma passed soon after they moved to this house. You could think of it as a house of unfulfilled dreams and wishes, but I experience as a house with possibilities. This is the house my daughter is growing up in. This is the same neighborhood I frequented with my parents, to watch the moon rise and eat pizza with my grandpa. Grandpa was a stogey academic and his best friend, who was also his neighbor, was a salt of the earth kind of man. They shared beer together every week. This neighborhood is entrenched with the history of my Grandpa’s life and the people he shared it with. Because of this sense of connection and history, I feel a sense of safety and belongingness here albeit the neighborhood being politically mixed and racially homogeneously white. But in recent years my sense of safety started to shift as certain politics curried hostility, aggression, and violence to specific groups like myself.

Twice a day I walk my small dog, Sushi who is paralyzed in her back legs, requiring a wheelchair for walks. It’s amazing how full of spunk she is. Once she sees the wheelchair, she’s starts bouncing around knowing it’s time for her walk. Everyone in the neighborhood knows Sushi. Regardless of politics, it’s funny how people can come together for dogs. We can dehumanize each other but for some reason we agree to not dehumanize dogs. One evening around 10pm, my husband and I decide to get Sushi ready for a walk. At this point, we have been 8 years in the journey of trying to become parents and that very night my abdomen was super swollen from a round of IVF. My surgery was the next day and despite the discomfort in wabbling, walking eased some of the tension. As we are hobbling down the street, we see a medium sized dog free roaming in front of a house with one of those flags (signaling politically conservative and what I would describe as hostile views). The dog bolts down the street running after us, barking, and lunging. I was afraid of the dog attacking my Sushi and terrified of the dog jumping on me causing me to fall and possibly risk the eggs my body worked so hard to collect during IVF.

A blonde woman comes walking over nonchalantly and calls the dog back. No real apology or recognition. Throughout the weeks and months, we continuously encountered this dog barreling down the street, sometimes with no human in sight, barking and lunging at us. It would sometimes come all the way to our front driveway, making me scared to even exit my home. Another evening when the dog chased us down the street, myself stumbling over trash bins as it lunged at me, I yelled at the lanky male figure off in the distance to keep their dog on a leash. The same blonde woman comes running over to screaming at me, saying I deserve it because I’m a “bad person”. She continues to scream now chastising me for yelling at her son.

My heart is beating so fast, as I rush into the safety of my home. How could she yell at me? Her dog was threating physical violence and somehow, I’m the bad person? Is this racially motivated? No doubt in my mind, there is so much societal conditioning on the purity of whiteness and the demonizing of people of color that some inclining of racial dynamics is at play here. But there was something else, something in the way she mentioned being bad for yelling at her son. With my heart racing, the fear surging, as well as righteous anger, I wanted nothing more than to punish this person. Call police, animal control, wake up the other neighbors. How dare you make me feel unsafe in this neighborhood, one that has been with me throughout my life! I took a moment to pause and touch the soft wool of my rug in the living room. Holding Sushi I reflected on how these are neighbors I never see during the daytime. Everyone else I have seen, talked to, connected with. These are neighbors who I’ve never seen walk their dog and their blinds always closed. I don’t even know what they look like, just some blurry outline in the dimly lit streetlight of the night. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard yelling coming from inside the house. I didn’t want to live in fear in my own neighborhood, and I didn’t want to be stuck in a yelling match with someone I might see every day (or at least several times a week) for the rest of my life.

I got up and told my husband that we are walking over there to talk this out. It’s lateish- maybe 9:30pm but I know they are still awake after our recent screaming match. I know that there’s a high chance these people own guns. I know there’s a chance these people are still angry. But I recognized this is a mom who feels she is protecting her son. I would never want to, even inadvertently, have a child feel unsafe in this neighborhood. I don’t know what this family has and is enduring. As I have felt safe as a kiddo walking these streets, I want that same feeling for every kiddo here, including this kid. In Lak Ech- you are my other me.

I knock on the door, heart pounding, hands sweating as I grip my husband’s fingers, I can hear the kid saying “Oh no, it’s that lady!”. After a couple of minutes, the mom opens the door, arms folded, eyes dead, and coldly says “what”. I look at her, soften my face and tell her that I’m sorry for inadvertently scaring her son but in that moment, I was scared of their dog. What happened next will stay with me for the rest of my life. The mom looked confounded. She couldn’t believe that I didn’t come there to fight with her. She immediately unfolded her arms and threw them around me crying. She told me how “no one ever does this”. The surprise in her reaction and the genuine disarming of her cold demeanor confirmed what I suspected- this woman rarely, if ever, is shown kindness. I shared how I want to create a safe environment for us neighbors to be there for each other, which includes her son feeling safe and for us to feel safe from her dog. I hugged her son and told him how I’m sorry to frighten him and how scared I am when the dog lunges. Seeing her son up close, I can recognize although he is tall (much taller than me) his face is young. He was scared by an adult (although much shorter and disabled but older) raising their voice. I let him and his mom know that should they need anything they could always come by our home. We start talking about our love of dogs and the challenges they are having training this dog. We start to brainstorm ideas on how to navigate safety while walking, and while there wasn’t a clear resolution, we didn’t see the dog running around the street again. We didn’t become best friends, nor did they even respond to our knocks at the door or letters to solidify a plan. Truth is, I don’t know what happened to that family as they moved on from the neighborhood.

I know I didn’t do anything wrong in raising my voice to have the dog leashed. I know it was wrong the way the mom ridiculed me. I know that there are leash laws that reinforced my concerns. As soon as I let go of litigating right and wrong, I was able to pull from somewhere deep inside (maybe my Buddha nature) and demonstrate another path.

Despite people sometimes behaving and holding perspectives that we might consider in conflict with our own moral compass, their humanity deserves to be held as well. Actually- it’s even more of a necessity to hold their humanity because morality and politics that are dehumanizing do not know another way to engage in conflict except to denigrate. Showing people there can be another path creates hope. However, I don’t want to wash over this story with toxic positivity to say that holding another’s humanity through compassion is all we need. Compassion to ourselves is also naming our need for safety as important. We cannot solely count on the other person to decide to take accountability for their actions, especially when conditioning and life experiences has never taught some folks how to take accountability. It’s such a hard process and often the rewards are internal and experienced, not obvious or appealing to those who are severed from their own emotional landscape or spirituality. Showing compassion to myself in this case meant hoping for the dynamics to shift but trusting myself to ensure my safety and my future children’s safety to the best of my ability. That meant documenting the incidents, getting advice from the humane society, and talking to our dog trainer. Should dynamics not shift, I was prepared. 

I am sharing this story because it profoundly moved me in trusting my wisdom to try another path even though I felt petrified. There are circumstances in which my wisdom tells me to run away, move to safety, and don’t show vulnerability. I trust that too. But for this example, I saw the opening of a parent who was trying to protect their child. Just as I want to protect my, then,  unborn child, and as I want to protect all children. My body was pumping from the adrenaline but something deep in the pit of my stomach felt steady. That’s my cue for my wisdom. I’m not sure if I can act in this way every time I get that message from my wisdom (if I hear it), but now I know this path exists inside me. I truly felt my Buddha nature and it wasn’t some abstract concept. I could feel it taking root in my body. My hope is that this inspires you to listen to your wisdom and when it tells you to take a chance, extend that compassion you give it a try.