Is compassion nature or nurture?
I’ve written about Carol’s and my new life together with three cats, Gracie, Elvis, and Oscar. Oscar is the cuddle cat. He loves a good lap. Prior to moving here, and Carol would add, prior to meeting me, Oscar was shy. He didn’t much care for strangers and he didn’t mew. But Hawaii changes you. Or in his case, changes mew. So does moving from a cramped Brooklyn apartment to a cavernous house.
Presently, Oscar is much more sociable with guests and vocal all around. He mews to let you know what he wants. He mews to find out where we are if we’re a couple of rooms away. And if we’re out of eyeshot, he mews to let us know he’s done eating so we can pick up his food. Nobody trained him to do this. He’s naturally compassionate and no negative early life experiences trained him out of it.
Is compassion nature or nurture?
When I’ve seen this question come up, it always elicits numerous responses, which means numerous people don’t know the answer. Truth is, compassion is nature unless nurture is unnatural. In that case, we repress.
The way we nurture is largely problematic. Western cultures by and large discipline through punishment and reward. Heart cultures by and large do not. Many don’t discipline children at all. In some First Nations, for example, disciplining young children at all was frowned upon. Children were allowed to be children until their age was up and they had to move on to the next phase of being. In many instances, children’s dolls were made of natural materials that could be chewed up and/or tossed in the water by one’s rambunctious child. To boot, the limited nature of the doll told a story to the child. The story of our impermanence, of needing to grow up and out of childhood when the time is right.
Brain people build toys whose stories are advertisements to get us to buy more of them. Their story creates a longing, a desire in us for them. They are built to last and collect, which keeps so many of us longing for our childhoods that we never quite grow up. We have no definition of what we’re growing into except that we’ve got to get a job, maybe feel pressured to get married, raise kids. Life revolves around making money for wealthy institutions. We use our spare time to block out our lives through drink, drug, video game, hobby, TV, shining a spotlight on us via social media—we know all the ways. We live them. Where is the authentic, natural adult role there?
Is compassion nature or nurture?
When we ask the single question, it is no wonder we get such divergent answers. How could we know? We do not live in a compassionate culture, because such requires interconnecting with one another inclusive of all life. In a disconnected culture, compassion is something we reacquaint with despite our nurture, not because of it. Because it is a remembrance, or a getting back in touch with our true nature, it can feel as if we learned our way to it when what happened was, the fog lifted.
And all of what we just described? The natural and the unnatural? The healthy and the unhealthy nurture? They are all natural, too. Disease exists in nature. Disconnection exists through us and we are nature. But it’s not enough to throw up our hands and rest there with an, “Oh, well.” Because the next insight is that, although there is nothing truly unnatural in this world, what that means for us is, it is just as natural to be unbalanced and fall off the high wire to our deaths as it is to regain our balance. One ends. One goes on.
Who are you in oneness?