Greetings all! Pretty wacky weather up here so far this Spring as we oscillate between dipping our toes into summer and falling backwards into late winter. My flock of White Crowned Sparrows is apparently done using me to fatten up and has moved on for colder pastures to the north. In their place though my hummingbirds have returned. Did you know there's little orange hummingbirds? I didn't until I moved here, but they're called the Rufous hummingbird and they do this bizarre dive bomb trumpeting thing at various shrubs that I can only assume is a war cry of death upon his rivals. Or a love song. Maybe both? It's hard to believe a bird the size of my thumb flies over 1,000 miles from here to Mexico and then does it again to come back every year. I feel like the least I can do is give them some sugar water to fight over when they get back. There's a certain level of sacrifice you learn to accept as you get closer to "natural", but part of me still wants to save them all.
I've often heard in various forms that "every accusation is a confession" and since moving somewhere more rural, my accufession is that I'm beginning to think real empathy is impossible. We can surely be sympathetic and we can certainly relate, but really understanding and feeling what another person is going through? I'm not so sure. At least not as adults with too much life behind us to be unbiased. Every person is out there bouncing around like atoms and electrons, similar enough when you zoom out, but too many individual experiences to say they're the same. Can a hydrogen that split from an oxygen really understand a hydrogen separated from another hydrogen just because they've both experienced a broken bond?
Does my experience with chemistry make that analogy both dumb and inscrutable to a lot of people? Certainly at least one of those things is true.
An easy example is death. It is something truly universal which we will all have some experience with, but how we experience it and relate with it is so vastly different that it's difficult to imagine any two people having the same feelings about it.
When you live in the burbs and the cities, most of us are first exposed to that natural order with older relatives or pets, and maybe a random critter that didn't get out of the road fast enough. But they're uncommon enough to be keystone memories and largely a hands-off affair. Unfortunate events that just happen sometimes.
Outside those walls, death is everywhere and it is frequent. It will happen randomly, it will happen on purpose, and it will at times come from your own hands. Death is a bedfellow from a young age and whether it's wild or tame, there will be life that ends, so that another can continue.
When death comes randomly and infrequently, you try to prepare for it in a way that makes it seem preventable or avoidable. When it is constant you start to think it of more in the scope of minimizing inevitable losses.
And this is just two barely different lives. Can I really say "I understand" to someone who has lived an entirely other kind of life? Is it arrogant to pretend to know what a person is going through internally because we both had a similar singular event? To unpackage all the years and distill it into a few familiar emotions and say I can "feel" it too?
Maybe I'm just too hung up on the semantics of "feeling" though. You know what I'm saying?
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