Empathy Paradox: Before the jump

For months I had the idea of writing this, but never did and now I’m in a rush. I need to get this out before a life changing event that is supposed to happen within 4 to 5 weeks (counting from when I finally started my attempt to write), but that based on recent symptoms my wife has had, it could happen much earlier, basically any moment now. This sense of urgency comes from what I believe is the non reversible effect and impact some events have in the way we see everything and this time I want to act and reflect before this one happens.

‘When I was your age…’

Growing up, especially in the teens years, it’s easy to feel annoyed when someone older tells us how the future is going to be, like we had no power to change our path. To me at least it always made me wonder why someone ahead in the journey is not able to look back and remember how they were a few years back in their path, aren’t they supposed to be in a much easier position to step in my shoes? But over the course of the years I’ve felt that our experiences don’t just stack up as things we can easily remember, instead they transform our mindset and shift it to a new stage making it hard to reset to a previous one. We keep changing and seem to forget how we used to think. Paradoxically, when we gain the experience that helps us understanding some people, we forget the one that helps us understanding others. Easiest example I can think of it’s that even though we all were kids, it’s sometimes hard to reflect back and empathize with a kid that is asking ‘why is that?’ over and over… and over.

After growing up I still don’t love non solicited unsympathetic experienced advice. Things I have done, like living abroad, has somewhat aggravated that feeling against it, especially when it’s about things that are indeed different back at home than where I live now, like cultural things. That said, I’ve started to see there are life experiences that are intrinsically human and similar for everyone that goes through them, and even if we want to feel our experiences are unique because of the context around each of us (which might be very unique indeed), what we feel in certain cases like losing someone or bringing somebody to this world it’s likely to be similar to what many people felt before us. I have to face it, I’m going through something others already know about.

A Jump Is Coming Up

So now I’m on the edge. I’m about to cross an important line, jump to another one of those mindset stages and going to be thinking differently about a lot of things.

I’m already in the transition. Getting ready for parenthood has been an interesting process (maybe worth of a separate piece) that has made me think on and plan for things completely new to me, but it has been a relatively short process. When I take a look a little farther back, before even deciding having a child, is where I find the version of myself that has been around for a longer time and it might soon be harder to remember.

Look Back

In the recent years I focused on my job, on traveling, on staying in good shape and enjoying with my wife all the fun things the city has for us. If I wanted to start doing something new I just looked for time for it and tried it: soccer league, music band, yoga, running, etc. If there was a cool restaurant or an exciting rock show in town I would try to go. If we wanted to visit a new place, we would start looking for the next long weekend and planning the trip.
Of course I couldn’t do everything I wanted because of a combination of limited money, time and sometimes willingness, but I had a relatively high level of control over my life. I owned my schedule and I enjoyed it.

Look Ahead

Then we consciously decided to make a change, and when I learned we were having a baby and envisioned a future of diapers, sleep cycles no longer than a couple of hours and other unknown things, I decided I wanted to do even more things for my self! Like I was never ever going to have time for them again.
I thought on spending more time on side projects, creating music, reading and writing. I made little progress on each of those things (these words are proof of how little I mean) and in the most recent weeks I came to the point where I just stopped caring much about it.
If I don’t get to do some things in the future is because my priorities are going to be much different and that is what we’re signing up for here: putting your self aside to focus on somebody else for whom, initially, you’re everything they can count on.

Ready To Jump. Will You Remember How Was It Back Here?

Yet I try to imagine, it’s hard for me to believe my parents went through this exact feeling already and were getting ready to devote so much time and effort into a little creature (my sister, she came first) without knowing anything about the job (because… nobody does) just purely based on love. Being so close to that moment myself I feel I could finally empathize with them as parents, but I won’t be really able to until I finally jump onto the new stage and meet them on the other side, just to find them being grand parents! A feeling I won’t be able to empathize with until who knows when. And so on, I’ll always be late, a few steps behind.
Well, here is what I want to emphasize to my future self. If I could remember how I felt a few steps back then I might be able empathize with people going through similar experiences. It can sound obvious and easy, but I don’t think it is.

Empathy to me is a sign of respect, which is something we see missing so often nowadays, but I think the paradox I’m trying to surface here it’s one of the reasons why empathy it’s just a hard thing to have. We just forget we also were teenagers, lived in that small town, thought that thing was easy to do, thought everyone else was wrong, felt no older person could understand us…
I want to believe that by looking back before every jump and remembering what we saw ahead we might be able to understand each other much better. Being patient, take the time and really make the effort to relate to those past feelings. For example, when reading a bad article… think on your own very first ones! It might help right now :)
It’s a personal challenge to me, but as part of being a parent I have to try. I’ll be getting lots of ‘why is that?’ sooner than I think.

Can’t think on how to explain this any better and she is coming anytime now. So here it goes, time to jump, wish me luck!