Saying the Word Over Again...

      I am reading a book by Andrew Peterson (2017) called Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities. In this book, Peterson devotes much of the second chapter to elaborating on an understanding of what compassion is, or is not. Is it a feeling? Well, it's more than a feeling, even though many people have talked about the emotions associated with it. Is it a reasoned principle or virtue? To a certain extent, but it's not the same as, say, courage, because it admits of neither extremes nor means. Peterson suggests that there is a combination of "practical wisdom" and "sense of common humanity" (p.16) in his analysis, opting for a more richly contextualized view of compassion which admits of varying intensities and ways of expression.
     Part of this discussion, I must admit, reminds me of an old game that kids used to play in the school yard, and it had to do with saying a word so often, repeatedly, that it starts to sound completely different from what it's supposed to refer to. For instance, if you keep saying the word "chair" over and over again, resting your mind only on the act of saying "chair", it starts to lose its meaning referent over time. Soon enough, one begins to wonder, "what exactly do these five characters symbolize?", since the very sound "chair" has nothing to do with the object you sit on that has four legs. 
   I believe that the same thing goes for the case of the word "compassion". Repeating it over and over in different contexts to try to get a better sense of what it is or is not, turns out to be a very fatiguing task for me. It ends up becoming such a broad appeal to continued reflection and "reasoned action" (p.16), that I am tempted to think that compassion is what a person makes of it, rather than being something that is fixed in nature, like a concept or a thing. In her discussions on gratitude, Kerry Howells (2012) also warns her readers of the dangers of trying to reduce gratitude into a kind of external "thing" (p.28), or a kind of disembodied concept. For Howells, the act of "doing gratitude" is an unfolding and deliberative process that is richly contextual and interconnected with others on a shared landscape of a community or a school.
   It seems that in both books, the act of letting go of these concepts of gratitude and compassion ironically leads to their renewal- precisely because at the end of the day, what they point to is not restricted to form. Gratitude and compassion are boundless ways of seeing and being which are not attached to objects, but instead use objects as ways of uplifting mind itself. But even these too are words, and I am afraid that the best they can do is point to lived here and now-ness. In other words, we cannot fall back on a reified concept of these two words, but must let our sense of wonder of what they might mean guide us to something that is more formless and interconnected.

Howells, K. (2012). Gratitude in Education: A Radical View. Boston: Sense Publishers
Peterson, A. (2017). Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities. London: Springer