Understanding

Walking in their Shoes …

“Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes isn’t as much about the walk or the shoes; it’s to be able to think like they think, feel what they feel, and understand why they are who and where they are. Every step is about empathy.” (Toni Sorenson, The Great Brain Cleanse)

“Before you judge my life, my past or my character. walk in my shoes, walk the path I have traveled, live my sorrow, my doubts, my fear, my pain and my laughter.”

“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” https://celebrateyoga.org/33-quotes-walking-someone-elses-shoes/

There really is no integrity or authenticity in our “knowing” if it is outside of the context of relationship and direct experience.

… until one walks in their shoes, one cannot imagine.

If one cannot imagine, one cannot understand.

What one cannot understand is feared, and fear creates stories in the mind;
little fictions unconsciously designed to create comfort and security by diminishing those that create fear.

Those that choose to do so will tell themselves they are comfortable and secure; and believe it.

Thus creating in the mind stories that make people invisible and without voice. Thought is constantly doing that. It is a survival instinct.

“That which is different, we don’t understand.
That which we don’t understand, we fear.
That which we fear, we kill.

“We kill people in many other ways
than through war and murder.

“We kill people with a look
of disregard or disgust.

“We kill people by looking
down on them.

“We kill people with words
that pierce to the heart.

“We use any means possible to remove that which is different, that with which we disagree; because it makes us uncomfortable. We even judge them and send them to hell in our own minds. All because of our own fear of difference.” https://livingwithopenhands2.blogspot.com/2019/04/thoughts-on-thought.html

Those that are discerning and seek understanding will clear their mind of any stories that make people invisible and without voice.

Poverty

Poverty is a complex issue and is equally destructive to the poor as to the rich; as poverty seeds itself within the people’s consciousness, both individual and collective, as well as both the oppressed and the oppressor; objectifying and dehumanizing as it goes, as it grows.

Poverty exists on many levels and cuts across every citizen in America.

Everywhere I turn, I see a poverty…
of money (and resources)
of meaning (and purpose)
of relationships (and community).

One of the greatest disadvantages of poverty is that it leaves people without access to options which are the result of resources, experiences, and privilege.

Possibly the greatest and most destructive poverty of all is a lack of understanding,

which exists among those that have the most resources and privilege because…

… until one walks in their shoes, one cannot imagine.

If one cannot imagine, one cannot understand…

And we fear what we do not understand.

Lack of understanding other people is the root of our own poverty

because diversity is the source of our riches, abundance, and sustainability.

When we do not seek to understand,

We lose the perspective that that “other” brings.

Perspective is lost when the mind stays closed.

Relationship is lost when our will stays closed.

Compassion is lost when our heart stays closed.

Our humanity is lost when we build walls to shut out the “other.”

All the time deepening our own poverty of relationships because of our unwillingness to understand other people and their diverse perspectives.

STRUCTURAL NUMBNESS

The numbness and the numbing power

The blindness and the blinding of fortune

The comfortableness of privilege

underlies and begets

The oppression of the poor

The crushing of the weak

The drowning of the less fortunate

insulating and isolating us from

the voices of truth

the poets of reality

the cries of the prophets of the age

(RI)

 “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

“Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”
(Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion)