I’m reminded of the character of May Boatright in Sue Monk Kidd’s shimmering novel, The Secret Life of Bees. Rogers famously asked children everywhere, “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” Or the sad? Or the despair? Or the fear? What do you do? Empathy is a social good, yet it requires us to find a healthy way to process all the pain and grief we take in. Some psychologists call this phenomenon “empathy overload”. The talk aimed to show the difference between sympathy and empathy, and why the former creates barriers but the latter builds bridges. An excerpt from one of her talks on this subject was even animated as a cartoon, which was widely shared through social media channels when it was first released. Brené Brown has written and spoken extensively about the power of empathy in forging true, authentic connections with others.
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They implement various tools such as role-playing different scenarios: how to respond to bullying, showing kindness to an outsider, etc., thereby allowing a child to walk in someone else’s shoes, and see things from their perspective. Many school children across the nation, including my own daughter, now receive empathy training through a curriculum called Social and Emotional Learning.
So how do we live in between feeling too much and feeling nothing at all?Įmpathy itself has become a bit of a buzzword of late, and overall, that’s a good thing. Our culture pulls us between these two extremes information overload leads to either overwhelming despair or an unconscious act of “checking out”. Many of us have found ourselves in that place of numbness without even realizing how we ended up there. Yet at the other end of the spectrum there is indifference, desensitization, and hardness of heart. It’s a burden far too heavy for any one of us to carry on our own. But I know that the suffering and grief of the world is a heavy burden to bear, made even heavier lately by the current state of politics and media – social and otherwise. Was Anthony Bourdain’s empathy his undoing? I don’t know, and I don’t want to presuppose only God can truly know the depths of Bourdain’s heart and the pain he carried. Too much pain, too much grief, too much heartache. They happened to real people with names and faces, and when Bourdain met them, he could not remain unaffected – he seemed to take their suffering into himself, and tried to carry it with them and for them.Īnd now some people say that perhaps, in the end, it was all too much.
The injustices and griefs amidst the geo-political conflicts he encountered were not neutral events to him. He deeply felt the pain of the world and the people whom he met in his travels. Woven throughout these tributes, there is a one common thread that appears again and again: Anthony Bourdain was a man of great empathy. I’ve read many tributes to Bourdain over the past few days, written by those who knew him well and those who didn’t know him any better than I did, and everyone in between. And now, not only his fans, but much more significantly, his friends and family – his young daughter – must face a world without him in it. Of course, it’s a complete cliché – the typical loss-of-a-celebrity mourning story: we didn’t know Bourdain, but we felt like we did, simply because of the way he wore his heart on his sleeve, and his grief in his weary, haunted eyes. Last Friday morning, when I read the news about his suicide, I felt as though my heart had broken wide open. He had mastered the art of the human connection, between himself and the people he met in his travels, but also between himself and his viewers, his fans. As wanna-be world travelers, we were immediately drawn in, not only by the food and the exotic locales, but also by his wit and his sharp intellect, which were equally matched by the depths of his compassion. My husband and I first discovered Anthony Bourdain about five years ago on Netflix, through his television shows, “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown”.
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