Frida's Notebook

On empathy and imagination (with thanks to J K Rowling)

A little over a year ago I tried to put into words here some thoughts I had on empathy and imagination and what they had to do with activism for human rights and social justice. What I managed to say was:

"Ultimately, though, I believe that the strongest motivator for the defense of human rights is ... empathy. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be a Palestinian mother who watched her child die because the ambulance carrying him to the specialised hospital in the West Bank was not allowed to pass an Israeli checkpoint that I feel compelled to work towards securing the right to freedom of movement for her and for everyone else. It is because I can imagine how it might feel to be an Algerian asylum seeker in New Zealand, labeled a security risk by the central intelligence agency but unable, even through my defense lawyer to see the basis on which I am accused of being such a risk, that I feel bound to do what I can to defend the right to a fair trial and a defense for him and for everyone else."

Today I watched the commencement speech that the amazing J K Rowling gave at Harvard University. I know it has been emailed and posted in various places, for good reason. It came to me from Blue Poppy, via Swirly. So I took a break from studying about how community psychologists should be committed to working with oppressed people to help achieve their goals for liberation and watched this video.

She puts it so well and I was not expecting it. Although I probably should have been expecting it, her Harry Potter books explore complex themes of marginalisation and social justice, including a fairly intense exploration of racism and xenophobia through the device of the "mud-bloods". But I wasn't. I under-estimated her and expected a speech about how important imagination is to the creative act. Which it is, of course. But she goes on to talk about how that creative act, the ability to imagine, lies at the heart of what makes us human. We, apparently unlike all other species, can imagine what it might be like in someone else's shoes and based on that creative act of imagining we can feel empathy. 

What I said in May last year was that I didn't believe that empathy was a "static quality that we are either born with or without. I think we can generate empathy, I believe we can cultivate the quality of empathy within ourselves."

I also had some ideas about how to generate empathy - they included a certain kind of travel and releasing ourselves to the transformative power of literature, art and film. I think those are still great tools for generating empathy. In fact my very next post was an exercise in using the creative power of poetry to cultivate the moments of powerful empathy that I experienced in day-to-day life in Afghanistan. But what I have been also learning, over and over again. Is the power of the simple practice of letting go, through seated meditation or whichever practice works for you, and revealing our natural warmth, compassion, imagination and empathy. 

Lessons from a long walk

Crossing the finish line - 29 hours and 28 minutes after we started

The Oxfam Trailwalker event has been a big part of my life in the past few months. It is a fundraising walk in which four team members walk together for 100km, not a relay and not a stop-and-sleep type event. We walked together over farmland and bush for nearly 30 hours. But first we trained!

The training walks were a kind of therapy for me in the early weeks and months of my return home. On gorgeous summer days in Wellington I would set out in the morning to walk for two hours or more and by the time I got home I'd have quietly processed all sorts of doubts and worries about coming home.

Many mornings I was accompanied by a very dear old friend, Andrew, who has known me long enough to let me talk my way through moral dilemmas and existential crises without trying to find answers for my unanswerable questions. On my wobbliest days I knew that I could find Andrew outside at 6 am ready to walk and talk and listen.

Once a week I did my training walk with an even older friend, Bronwyn, with whom I used to climb trees and explore creeks as a child. At the same time I left NZ for Afghanistan, Brownyn and her husband and two boys left for a mission with the UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon. As you probably remember, in 2006 Israel attacked Lebanon and Bronwyn and her young sons were evacuated after a week of bombing in their town. They had to leave their father and husband behind to finish his mission.

Bronwyn is one of the few people here in New Zealand to whom I don't have to try to explain how I'm feeling. She just gets it. Our weekly walks have been a joy and a balm to me. Now that I'm settling more and more we talk less about war and trauma and more about our respective studies. I still think that nothing beats a long walk for a really good conversation.

Many times I walked alone. I listened to great audio books on my iPod (I highly recommend both "Water for Elephants" and "The Life of Pi" in Audiobook form). I listened to the sounds of the harbour. I listened to my own thoughts. I listened to the silence. I answered my own questions. I found more questions to answer, and I found questions to which there is no answer and learned little by little to live with the questions.

Okay - enough about the training walks. They were great.

Also great, astoundingly so, was the response and support we got from friends and family (including lovely readers of this blog). We originally set ourselves a target of raising $2500. Within 48 hours of posting the fundraising website we had passed that target. So we doubled it to $5000. We also passed that. In the end we've raised a little over $7250. This part of the experience was overwhelming positive for me.

Coming home from Afghanistan I struggled with the glaring contrast between the comfort, ease and luxury of life here in New Zealand and the poverty, insecurity and struggle of life in Ghor. I often looked around me and wondered if people had any idea how lucky they were. I wondered if they even cared that their life of comfort was possible only because of a globally imbalanced economic system which favours the rich at the expense of the poor.

When I invited people to make a donation to Oxfam's work with some of the poorest people in the world in support of our 100km walk I was stunned by the response. I can say with confidence that people DO know how lucky they are. People DO care that so many others live in poverty. They DO want to find ways to change that. When I offered people one way to make a contribution to making that change they responded with enthusiasm and generosity. It was a huge part of my healing. Thank you.















A hug for my cousin (and physio-extraordinaire) Helen

Then came the actual walk. We were a team of four women who would walk together for 100km. We didn't even all know each other before we began. One of our original team members had to withdraw at the last minute and her replacement didn't know my cousin Susannah and I. We broke all the training guidelines about training together. I had done all my training alone in Wellington, the others had done their best to work around child-care and work responsibilities to fit in some joint training walks in Auckland, but our newcomer was making it up as she went along.

We had the most extraordinary support crew. It included my parents, my sister, my cousin (a physio who delivered therapeutic massages through the night) our original teammate and another cousin. Various aunts and cousins turned up through the night. This amazing crew carried us through 30 hours on our feet, by meeting us at 15km intervals giving foot rubs, filling our Camelbacks with sports drink, handing us hot water bottles to heat our chilly hands, strapping our blistered feet and serving us hot soup. I was humbled and moved by the love they showed us and the committment they made to the cause for which we were walking. I was reminded of the power of a team and the importance of giving and accepting help.

But despite the BEST support crew ever, in the end it was we four who had to keep walking. And in that process I uncovered a layer of myself of which I'm not overly fond. When the going gets really tough, so do I. When we'd been walking for 24 hours it was dark and cold and we were making our way through a hilly and relatively challenging section of the walk before dawn. At this stage of the walk, about 85kms into the event, we each had to reach deep into our personal wells to find our own strength.

My personal approach at this stage was "focus on the positive, keep your eyes on the finish line and just keep going". It is the approach which has got me through endurance running events, through mad deadlines on big work projects and through apparently unmanageable situations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I believe that you have to use what limited energy you have under such extreme circumstances to propel yourself forward.

So when my team mate spent hours complaining about how tired she was, how much her ankle hurt, how steep the hills were, how dark it was and how long the sun was taking to rise I tried to encourage her to focus on the positive. I encouraged her to think about the women and children for whom we were walking. I encouraged her to find silly songs to sing with me. I suggested that she hold off her tears for once we were across the finish line, in case having a big cry sapped her precious reserves of energy. In the end I lost patience (God have mercy on my soul, I had been walking 85km as well!) and just told her that there was nothing I could do to fix her sore ankle or get her to the end any faster and I didn't want to hear her complaints any more.

I can't tell you how bad I felt about this. I spent days and days trying to justify my harshness to myself. It helped that my deeply compassionate mother and cousin had also reached the limits of their patience with her. But that still didn't take away the fact that I'd simply not been able to reach deep enough myself to find the patience and compassion to keep gently encouraging.

We did all get to the end. She and I walked across the finish line arm in arm and she was beautifully gracious about the leadership (her word!) I'd shown to get us all there together. But I struggled to get past the fact that this amazing event, which had come to symbolise so much to me in the process of my learning to live a life of making peace here in NZ, has ended up with me telling a team mate that I didn't want to hear any more complaints! Doesn't seem very gentle, compassionate or peaceable.

So in the end the lesson of this long walk was this: I had to let go of my expectations of the event and of myself in the event; I had to embrace the messy thrilling reality of the event and of what we had each learned about ourselves in the process; I had to celebrate what we had achieved and let go of what I felt I had not achieved; and I had to cut myself some slack (because when blood sugars are low and I'm sleep deprived I end up being just as tough with other people as I usually am with myself and seen in that light it is not so admirable!). 

Lessons in letting go: Part V

The monarch butterfly emerged from her chrysalis yesterday. My apology for fuzzy focus, I was a little awe struck by her beauty and mystery

If I had to identify one key theme of my life in the past two years it would be this: it is harder to let go than to hold on, even when what we are clinging to is obviously doing us no damn good.

When I learned about Mr. B's abduction I was overwhelmed not only by fear and concern for him but also by a terrible wave of guilt. The guilt washed in like a heavy rain cloud stealing the sunny moments from my day. As I walked home from the coast along the ridge of Wellington's stunning "green belt" - surrounded on all sides by vistas of harbour, hills and native bush - I would be about to lose myself in a moment of pure bliss when a voice in my head would berate me.

"How can you be so happy when we are still suffering?"
"What about us?"
"Don't you care about us at all?"
"Have you forgotten about us?"

And beneath it all this insidious message:

"If you let yourself go fully and enjoy this moment then you will forget about us"

Quietly, quietly this week I have come to recognise that I was hanging onto the guilt for fear that if I let it go I would also let go of them. I was afraid of becoming like so many other people, so wrapped up in my own world, my own happiness and comfort (or lack thereof), that I would stop caring about them.

Them.

All the people I've met in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and Palestine whose lives continue to be insecure, poor and relentlessly harsh. All the people I worked with who are still there, working through the cold, dark winter to bring a little relief, to provide a little security. All the people I have never met but whose conflict and natural disaster afflicted worlds are more real to me some days than this fantasy land we live in here in New Zealand.

I'm terrified of forgetting them. But how could I ever forget them? Seriously. It's impossible, right? But I've been so afraid of it that I've been clinging to my guilt as a kind of reminder. Every time I get too close to relaxing into joy, pleasure and fun my guilt kicks in like one of those electric shocks that scientists give to rats in aversion response research.

"Oh - look at that amazing sunrise over the south coast. Feel the sun on my skin. Feel the amazing freedom of walking: alone and safe. Revel in the pleasure of the moment. This is perfection. This is bliss."

ZAP - guilt

"Ouch. Oh, no. I was forgetting them. I was forgetting how terrible the world is for a moment. Thank goodness for guilt. This way I'll never forget."

Crazy.

I'm a little bit crazy like that. I guess we all are. Hanging onto guilt, fear, pain just because we are afraid of what might happen if we let it go.

Realising that I was choosing to hold onto the guilt because of this fear of forgetting, together with realising that it is impossible for me to ever forget, has helped me begin to let it go. Little by little I've been letting go of the guilt. Letting myself relax into the joyful moments. The joy of walking free and safe along the hill behind my own house. Those are the freedoms for which I would fight for any other person. So I guess I can let myself enjoy them without guilt.

PS: No confirmed news of Mr. B but thanks to HiK for her report that he may still be alive and being held. I'm holding onto that hope.