Recently I read a book called The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. It is a collection of essays influenced by personal experiences that encompass the theme of empathy. From her time as a medical actor, in which Jamison role-played hospital patients suffering from complex diseases in order to train med students to diagnose and empathize, to her personal experience as a woman and how her emotions are dramatised and dismissed as a stereotype of her gender, Jamison asks these questions: how does empathy deepen us as people? And how does practicing it change the very essence of our personalities, our relationships, and our day-to-day lives?

Many people can dismiss the topic of empathy as “elementary” or “common sense,” but if you really take a moment to view your life panoramically, how often can you say that you practice it? When other people talk about you, do they describe you as empathetic?

Here is the truth of the matter: as a society, we have lost our ability to care for people. It’s ugly and hard to accept, but it’s the case. Our lives are surrounded by the “me, myself, and I” mentality so much, that we blind ourselves to the fact that we live amongst other human beings who experience, suffer, love, work, and create. The meaning of empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It's to take the focus away from your own wants and needs, and consciously be selfless for the benefit of others.

So how do you practice this? It’s so easy to be empathetic towards those who deserve it, like cancer patients and the marginalized, but what about those who don’t? Like your boss, or those you disagree with politically? And what if the real problem lies in those categorizations? Are those who deserve empathy only those whose struggles are apparent? Where are the lines drawn? Who draws them? If everyone desires empathy, who are we to decide who receives it?

The solution lies in the idea of re-wiring; the unlearning of what we have been taught. This defense complex, the lack of trust we have built with each other, does not protect us; it ruins us. It makes us cruel; it makes us selfish; it tarnishes the beauty we hold. And isn’t that the reason why we build these walls in the first place? To protect us from those people?

Empathy isn’t “being nice”. It is the act of loving people intentionally; putting ourselves aside and telling people, “You matter because you exist.”

Leslie Jamison says it this way:

“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.”

So let us re-find the humanity in ourselves. Let us pay attention. Let us look up to realize the journey of the human experience and the universality of human suffering. And let us choose to love people, not for reciprocation, but out of human goodness.