It is very dangerous to your health to trust anybody and to expect anything at all, especially emotionally. It is dangerous in big ways, like the obvious betrayals and heartaches in life, to small ways, like the hurt feeling from an unreciprocated smile. So then it should make sense to be misanthrope and a people-hater.
But this is were compassion comes in. Compassion is vital to the health of your own mind and body. A sense of peace within society—without feeling like you are always reacting to the last thing that happened or stressing about the next thing that may—depends on compassion. It’s not hard to realize that you yourself cause others pain, big and small, whether you like it or not, just by virtue of being the “other" in their worlds. Your own feelings and level of engagement with others are always shifting, giving then taking, sometimes retreating into your snail shell and other times more extroverted. So just like everyone else you engender feelings of disappointment, hurt, and pain in others, even if just in unintentional ways you never realize.
And then when you see your own up-and-down, ever-changing nature reflected in others, you have the decision to forgive them or not. If you forgive them for their follies, then you can earnestly forgive yourself for your own. Intuitively, we know it just works that way. You simply can't forgive yourself without forgiving others. You can’t really pardon yourself, saying, "Well, I'm just human," without pardoning others for being human too. You forgive because of the simple fact of common “humanness.” Then you can get to work on real inner and outer peace. So compassion is in fact selfish.
— Gabriel Fenteany, March 31, 2016
Painting: Superbia e Perdona (Haughtiness and Forgiveness) by Daniela Gioia
