Simple Pleasures

Simplicity. As humans, we’re taught that simplifying things makes them easier to understand, so that we can convey our message to more people, with fewer complications that might confuse people.  How easy is it though? And that, of course, depends on how we think as individuals. Someone with a mechanical bent might explain things in terms of the workings of a project or idea. Someone more theatrical might define things in the way people interact with one another.  And yet another will illustrate that our journey through life will define how we see things. So, who’s right? And, of course, they all are right, whatever right means in this case. And I use ‘right’ in quotes because it is how we see the world that makes one answer make more sense to us as individuals.  The trouble, if ‘trouble’ means ‘conflict’ in this case, means that while the workings of a project might define how plans are made to the mechanically inspired, they will mean next to nothing to those who are more spiritually influenced; this latter group will want to know how the ‘workings’ will motivate those more celestially motivated, and why we should get on board with things we don’t understand in ways that mean something to us. Herein lies the work of those organizing or managing such endeavors, to reach into ourselves and find those individual strands of mechanization, or spirituality, or theatricality, that we can take the ‘vision’, i.e. the project at hand, and create a way for everyone involved to support the central vision, and find a common way to create the desired result.  

Oh.  Of course.  And, really, brain surgery is easier….  Now, while I don’t mean to denigrate the skills of brain surgeons, my point is that it takes exceptional skill, as a communicator, to gather a group of diverse, multi-talented people, and direct them toward a common, higher goal, AS A GROUP, and find ways to bridge gaps in the understanding of how things need to be done, but more, in finding ways to communicate what a could be a commonly understood idea, in ways that each one of these people can not only grasp, but can see its importance to others, as well as themselves, in helping to create this new idea.

And that ‘skill’ is empathy.  There is a goal, be it ending world hunger, decreasing the number of people using narcotics, making your neighborhood a safer place to live, or teaching more people to read and write, that unite and bind a diverse group, and help construct a better world.  Why empathy? Because it allows us to drop our personal narrative for something outside ourselves, and to concentrate on improving something bigger than ourselves, but which is part-and-parcel of who we are as people. Of looking, not only at the way we wish the world might be, but at what opportunities might be available for and to others, of what might be accomplished if everyone had the same educational possibilities, and if we all worked for that same, equal standing.