Feed Your World

Photo credit: Anne Taintor

“Where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears. The only bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom. Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.” That stanza really rocked  my six-year-old world and the question of “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” was my first foray into existentialism. The concept of others not knowing the joys that I had was just so devastating to my lily-white world and I felt like I needed to do something, anything. That was, most likely, the beginning of my continuing journey with empathy. 

Being empathetic is a big part of the human condition and your ability to have it is a surefire way to keep narcissism, psychopathy, or sociopathy at a distance. When you’re six and think that all families have chocolate fondue on Christmas Eve, learning about starvation and disease is a wake-up call. Images of Ethiopian children with swollen bellies and skeletal limbs filled my mind and I became a very disturbed first-grader. If God took care of me, why didn’t God take care of others? How did I get so lucky? My very first existential crisis and I cried myself to sleep some nights imagining myself starving and not getting Christmas presents.

My empathy for others only grew with time and age. Anything I heard about on the news (which I watched nightly), I would see and feel in exceptionally vivid detail. Empathy, however, became a tricky thing the older I got because I never realized just how fine the line between empathy and idiocy is. When I lived in Caracas, this got me in trouble in the dating world. I went on a date with a guy because he brought me flowers on a weekly basis so I finally gave him a shot (even though I didn’t want to) because I felt bad for all the trouble he had gone through to get me flowers. He worked for a florist for Christ’s sake, it wasn’t that difficult. Then I find out within minutes on the date that he lives with his wife and children. Oh, ok. A.Di.Os. Amigo. See? Idiocy.

Our ability to feel for others paves the way for a deeper human connection that most of us crave. We do, however, have to always be mindful of that fine line between feeling for others and being soft as shit. As I wade through this fourth decade of my life as a separated mom of three with a full-time job, I have to be mindful of how my empathy manifests. Flowers don’t require anything from me anymore. They are, after all, just flowers; fragile, impermanent, and rotting within a week. Carnations are my favorite because at least they last longer. All the others pale in comparison to those little floral gangsters.

I can neither fix nor feed the world like I wanted to back when all those 80s pop icons demanded I do just that in the horribly-written, western-centric lines of Do They Know It’s Christmas? The only thing I can do is make you think and, if lucky, laugh through my writing and being a mom, teacher, co-worker, sister, daughter, and friend. I will feed my world instead of the world and you should probably do the same. Laugh through whatever heartache you feel today because life really is funny when you don’t think about it too much. When your empathy stymies you or turns you into an idiot for a hot minute, return to feeding your world. It’s all you got.