Compassion is not the same thing as love. You don't have to love anyone to have compassion. You could even despise everyone and yet still have compassion. Compassion is about seeing your own silliness, sadness, suffering or stupidity in others', and making theirs your own, just feeling and forgiving with a sense of familiarity.
Compassion is a liquid concept. It doesn't fit into any emotional category neatly. It can stem from many superficial ascriptions, all the way from a selfless sense of almost universal love to a misanthropic sense of irony over human folly and cruelty. But, in the end, the common element is just feeling—really feeling, not as a momentary pang of guilt, but as something genuine—feeling not only your own cares but others' too, and seeing something of your own in others', and vice versa. I think that's about the most basic thing you can say. Beyond that, it can have many sources, many expressions. But in the end it's just the basic impulse of human commonality, of just humanness. It's just the basic recognition that we are all part of this strange human experience, all ultimately helpless against things like time and injustice and cruelty that we cannot understand or control.
And so it is... Just feeling.
— Gabriel Fenteany, March 20, 2016
Painting: The Absinthe Drinker by Edgar Degas (1876)
