In Defense of Giving a Damn

Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

Let’s be honest here: at a time like this, feeling is hazardous to one's health.

A working heart can be a liability in these days because its treasure, its beautiful, sacred tenderness is the very thing that leaves it prone to injury. Every false word, every act of violence, every appearance of injustice strikes another vicious blow to its surface. Like a twisting piñata struck in rapid succession, it sustains the damage until it can no longer help but to break open and spill out all the goodness within it.

It is a brutal thing, to be daily emptied in this way.

And so to prevent this, many people decide that their only protection is to stop feeling altogether; to become so closed-off and so hardened that they are no longer moved by the pain in their path, free of being burdened by the suffering of another. They begin to abide other’s trauma, until one day their hearts become stone things, heavy and cold inside their chests. Yes, they've escaped further wounding but they've lost their softness, they've surrendered their supple flesh and become impervious to anything that might move them into harm’s way in the way empathy does.

Friend, these are frankly heartbreaking days, and I imagine right now you're wondering whether or not it's worth it to be this invested in the suffering of strangers, what good it does you. You're so exhausted by the breaking and the bleeding, and you're asking yourself if you should just stop giving a damn altogether like so many of the people you think you envy because they are oblivious.

You shouldn't.

Compassion is the lifeblood of our fragile humanity. It’s the whole point of showing up every day; the thing that tethers us all together, and in at this precise place and time in the history of the planet that compassion is more precious than ever. The world needs people like you who are willing to have their hearts broken; people who wake every day prepared to be wounded on behalf of another, because they know that this allows someone else to be seen and heard and known in a world that renders so many invisible, silent, estranged.

It is in inviting ourselves to feel the pain of people we don’t know that we see our kinship with them, our connectedness, our sameness despite the surface differences. It is in the crucible of such bruising that the best parts of us are formed. No one ever became a better version of themselves through apathy or cruelty.

And the thing is, we've seen the price of becoming heartless.

We know what happens when a human being loses the ability to grieve over another's anguish, when it disregards everything but itself, when it becomes the narcissistic center of its sadly small world. We've witnessed what such an existence yields: selfishness, greed, contempt—and this is not the path worth walking, pain or no pain. You know it and I know it. The last thing this world needs is another dead-hearted cynic, blissfully ignorant robot, or self-centered blessing-hoarder. We’re full up on them and look where it’s gotten us. An entire political party and a massive swath of a religious tradition have gone all-in with cruelty, and we know that yields some rotten, putrid fruit.

No, we need to face it: you and I are doomed to live this way because that fierce, flexing muscle in the center of our chests will not let us live any other way. And yes, this fact is a vulnerability but make no mistake it is a weapon, too. It is what lifts us and moves us and propels us straight into the crossfire of conflict when every instinct says to run the other way. Compassion is the defiant, relentless, rebellious burden that will not allow us to turn away when someone is hurting—and there are so many who are hurting right now.

And this rare capacity to still care is the one thing the heartless people are threatened by, because they know that there is no more formidable adversary than a tired, pissed-off, heartbroken human being who will not relent. This is who you are, which is why you are dangerous to those who traffic in hatred of difference and fear of the other.

So nurse your wounds, sew up the gaping holes once more, and rest until the blood flow returns—and then jump into the fray again; your wild and open heart affixed to your sleeve, prepared to break once more in the cause of the suffering around you. It’s the better path.

Yes, you are hurting—and you are the person the world needs most right now. 

Please, don’t stop giving a damn.