Complex Numbers

After All

PROMPT January 29

Everyone did a great job with filling the war chest yesterday! There's so many great prompts and I'm sure Em will love every one of them.

Since today *is* War Chest Wednesday, I'm going to grab one.

What is your favorite virtue? Give a few examples like kindness, cleanliness, tact, truth, generosity. Is your favorite one you possess, or one you simply admire in other people? Do you have a strategy to develop it yourself?

Prompt is courtesy of Kåre เลียม Enga

Snark.

Wait, is that a virtue? No? Everyone hates it? Well, shit.

I'm glad Kåre เลียม Enga's other idea, the one involving a certain mouthless feline, didn't make it into the prompt. Still, I find the juxtaposition of "tact" and "truth" amusing, since those are sometimes incompatible.

Other examples of virtues? Well, I suppose there are two loosely defined kinds of virtues: directed toward the self, such as tenacity, self-control, or mental flexibility; and directed toward others, like charity, fairness, and loyalty. There might be a third kind, but it's intertwined with religion, and one does not need to be religion to be virtuous; sometimes, it seems, religion gets in the way.

But there's one virtue that, I think, influences many of these others, both inward and outward, and that is compassion. One can be compassionate to others, obviously; but it's also good to be compassionate to oneself. I know I'm harder on myself than I am on others, and I could stand to cut myself a little slack now and then.

Unfortunately, for myself, compassion isn't something that comes naturally. I have to think about it deliberately. I mean, my first reaction when someone's holding up a line at the grocery store, or cutting me off in traffic, or trying to sell me insurance, is usually annoyance. I have to reach for serenity, and I have to reach for compassion: knowing, logically, that everyone is the star of their own show, and they can each justify their own actions, and maybe they're just having a bad day. Maybe their dog just died, or their house has a leak, or they're worried about a friend.

And yet, compassion is the one thing I want to strive for. On a purely selfish level, it helps me as a writer to try to see others' points of view. But more importantly, I think that if I could crack the code of compassion, perhaps other people will appreciate it if they know someone cares about what they're going through, whatever that may be.

There was some discussion a while back about what people are "really" like. I believe that we have to practice being who we want to become. If something that you want to be isn't a part of your character, is it "fake" to try to practice that virtue until it becomes a part of you? I don't think so, myself; otherwise, how could any of us deliberately change? So, no, I'm not a compassionate person. But I'm working on it.

I'm not very good at it. It's not like I can learn it like I'm learning French, or like I learned how to do engineering. But I've seen peoples' actions that I have identified as "compassionate," and that's what I strive to emulate.

One such person that stands out for me is a lesser-known singer/songwriter named Dar Williams, who as far as I'm concerned is the Avatar of Compassion -- so it's her song I'm going to feature to tie in with this theme.

Go ahead push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control and reined my soul in tight

Well the whole truth
Is like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world
So I stopped the tide froze it up from inside
And it felt like
A winter machine that you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live
There was no joy it's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost
So I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep

I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well
To know myself through them...