Melissa Morewitz- Topic of My Choice #1

For sociology homework last night, I had to read about compassion. Compassion is a hard thing to understand because I feel like it had many meanings according to the reading I did in a book called "To Love and Be Loved," by Sam Keen. This book is actually not a hard read at all and sometimes I enjoy it although I do not usually enjoy reading at all! He not only describes compassion as understanding other people's situations and struggles, but also as coming to the realization that we are all mortal beings and treating each other as so. I got sort of lost in this concept because I thought we all knew each other to be mortal beings, but as I read more, I sort of got the bigger picture. We go through life thinking "it could never happen to me" or "we will live happily ever after," but the truth is that neither of those is true. Bad things are always awaiting us, including struggles or fights with ourselves or people we love and life isn't complete without hardships. Once we realize that we are all mortal beings who all face different struggles and to various degrees, it gets easier to feel compassion. Like a great speaker once said, life is like two train tracks going the same direction just at different speeds, one has on it the hardships, the struggles and the bad times on it and the other has the successes, the joys and the easy times; they are never at the same place at the same time but they are always going together.