Compassion is the natural emotional response to all that gives us life.
Consider what gives us life?
None of us produce clean air, but we all pollute it with each exhale of carbon dioxide. One critical function of the billions of trees on earth is to clean the air of carbon. Accordingly, trees give us life.
Nutrient foods give us life because this is how we obtain critical nutrients not produced by our bodies. Nutrient rich food requires nutrient rich soil, which is comprised of billions of living and deceased creatures accumulated over millions of years. Maintaining the nutrient rich soil requires the accumulation of knowledge built over thousands of years. Accordingly, billions of people and creatures we will never know give us life.
Our bodies use pressure to circulate blood, oxygen, and essential nutrients. While our skin is designed to offer a first line of defense against infection, our skin is incapable of containing the inner pressure of our circulatory system without the assistance of the earth’s atmospheric pressure. In deep space, our bodies would expand to twice normal size as the vacuum of space would pull the air from our bodies, rupturing our lungs and killing us in the process. Accordingly, the Earth’s atmosphere gives us life.
I could go on, but I know you get the point.
The disconnect with most people in our social interaction today is the idea that compassion is discretionary.
Compassion is the authentic response of any person who realizes their existence is interdependent on humanity and the ecology that sustains us.
Advancing our self-interest at the expense of the hands that sustain us is not only self-defeating, it is pathologically detached from the reality of our mortal lives.
Like the air we breathe, compassion is the essential emotion expressing appreciation for our very existence.