It’s hard to walk around with a billboard showing exactly what your hardest thing is. It’s hard for it to be public and constant. Everyone has hard things, many just hidden inside; and that’s got to be hard too. I went to a baby group and I explained that Margot has developmental delays, which was hard, and at the same time I didn’t know what hard things the other moms had going on inside because Margot’s disability and my thing are somewhat expected topics of the group; theirs, conventionally, are not.
When you go to the Emergency Room, you’re asked to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. If you don’t speak English or you’re not developmentally able to use such an abstract concept, you’re given a concrete rendering of the scale, as below.
What I realized is, it’s incredibly unbiased: there are no words, just faces. It doesn’t say that a 10 is being held in a Nazi concentration camp, ISIS torture chamber, or by Boko Haram… You supply the definition of 10 for yourself. Because each person’s 10 is different and to define a 10 across the board would make triage impossible. The hospital needs to know where you, individually, are at, and I’ve realized this concept translates to daily life as well.
If I have a friend who seems to have “the perfect life” on the outside and then her children are simultaneously diagnosed with degenerative hearing loss and she grieves it like a 10, that’s because it is a 10 for her and no amount of prior “perfectness” is going to soften that blow. She has not yet personally faced such a blow, no matter how many families she has seen deal with one, and so, for her, it is really and truly a 10 and my level of compassion cannot be based on my own scale or contempt for how much easier it seems. I must empathize with the raw pain of getting your 10 redefined. I know that pain and I can be sympathetic toward it, regarding her with tenderness toward her 10.
Comparison is the thief of joy, and empathy. It is the breeder of contempt, malediction and desolation.
When I am present with Margot, I am not always experiencing my bad 10. In fact, I am now and again experiencing that ever-revising good 10! Just as I expected when I was becoming a mom, each new step brings new joy and pride and awe. The fact that the steps are (painstakingly) far between does make them very sweet indeed.
Mindfulness educators write often about tenderness. As a concept, it was very hard for me to grasp “tenderness toward oneself” and “tenderness toward others.” What does it mean to be tender? I still don’t entirely know, but I think I’m getting a glimpse. I think it’s recognizing the feeling beneath the experience and being compassionate toward that feeling because I have been there too. It’s tenderness toward the feeling of being at a 10, not judgment of what the 10 is; that’s out of anyone’s control. We don’t choose our 10s, we just have them. And when someone is at their 10 it sucks just like my 10 does and your 10 does and the horror story 10s do. That’s enough. It will get revised again later, and that’s just another opportunity for compassion, on everyone’s part.
When Skies Are Gray 