Tag Archive for 'SuperForester Molly Eliza'

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A speaker I heard last week was talking about the difference between pity and compassion, and how most people don’t have a problem with pity but forget to have compassion. I didn’t fully understand until he put it this way:

I take pity.
I give compassion.

The words take and give alone show the difference between the two, but here’s the actual definition of the two, according to Merriam-Webster:

pity: sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy.
compassion: sympathetic awareness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.

Isn’t it so easy to feel pity for others? We all feel pity for those in Japan right now, but the speaker made a valid point that in a couple of months we probably won’t be thinking about them anymore. Our pity will move on to something else. The point I got out of this was that pity is useless, pity is merely taking an emotion out of a situation. But having compassion is giving because of that emotion you feel.
And you are never better than when you are giving.