Now You Know...

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Empathy is hard.

It’s not necessarily that humans are inherently self-absorbed—although that does describe an uncomfortable percentage of us—it’s just that life is complicated and challenging enough without having to step out of our own shoes and into someone else’s. This is why the current period of enforced empathy may prove in some ways to be a good thing—an opportunity, even.

For perhaps the first time in the history of the world, all of us are experiencing the same thing, at the same time.

Sure, some of us are floating around these anxious COVID-19 seas in the isolation of a leaking, decrepit, wooden dingy, while others have the luxury of a high-end yacht. But even with this added revelation of the unfairness of the world, as well as the fact that some are still living in denial about the seriousness of our collective predicament (go home and wash your hands please—seriously), the fact remains that we’re all dealing, in some way or another, with many of the same emotional experiences.

We are isolated, we are bored, we are lonely. We are grieving for the stories we had been telling ourselves of futures that now may never come to be.

Now, more than perhaps ever before, we are together. And although this is in many ways the worst of times, it is also the best of times; because it affords us an unprecedented opportunity to pause, reflect, and imagine ourselves into someone else’s shoes.

It’s a sentiment going around the internet, with memes such as, “Now no one is asking stay-at-home mothers what they do all day,” or “And just like that, Monk is regarded as completely sane,” or even (and this one might just be our favorite), “Day 7 at home and the dog is looking at me like, ‘See? This is why I chew the furniture.’ ”

This is a good thing.

It is good to attempt to see the world from outside our own, limited framework. It is an opportunity to grow in our understanding of other people’s perspectives.

One such opportunity is in the area of education.

For many of us, this is our first time reckoning with a reality in which getting a quality education for our children has become difficult. We begin to see what an enormous privilege it is to have such easy access to great teachers and educational resources.

The world already has an education divide that can seem unbridgeable. It’s a world in which children in minority language groups in poor and developing countries sometimes don’t even have a single book in their own language. We and our partner organizations have worked tirelessly to bridge that gap, using tools like the Bloom Software to help minority language communities begin to create their own educational resources, and even their own fledgling literature.

Perhaps the shared, empathy-building opportunity being forced upon us by the pandemic can help us to step into a growing awareness, on an emotional, visceral level, of what it means to not have access to an aspect of modern life that we so often take for granted—our education. In 2014, two hundred and sixty-three million children were out of school. Sixty million of those were primary school children. Now that you’ve had a taste of that deprivation with your own kids, can you imagine how that must feel for the millions of parents and children all over the world for whom it’s not just a blip, but a daily reality?

The world we will find ourselves in on the other end of this shared experience will likely be vastly different from the world with which we started. There will be growth in education, as necessity gives birth to an explosion of invention and innovation. But at the same time, the existing gap in the availability of education will grow even wider, as the economic shock wave of this global pandemic will reverberate into the future most strongly in countries that are already at a disadvantage.

Will you hold onto your newfound understanding of what it feels like to be deprived?

Will you step outside the challenges of your own experience? Will you, who are so used to privileges that many people have never been able to access, be willing to carry that new understanding with you in order to begin to make a real difference? 

We here at SIL LEAD will continue to serve minority communities around the world.

If you’d like to join us in that work, please click on THIS LINK to DONATE.  

But wherever you put your resources and time moving forward, we’d like to challenge you to take this opportunity to pause, reflect, and grow in your understanding of what it means to be fully human—to share, now and forever, in the struggles and challenges of people around the world who, just like you, are finding their lives shaped by a pandemic they did not ask for and cannot control.

Thank you.

And please: wash your hands.