Winter in the Swimming Pool: Reflections on Empathy

Winter is coming, the temperature dropped to minus eight in the night, and my weather-driven posts continue. This morning I introduced my little daughter to ice. She was amazed as I dropped a stick into the pond and it went “crack”, and skidded across the surface. The sun is shining, the skies are clear and it’s below freezing. All the remaining fruits and flowers are dead. My elder daughter and I reacted to this by going swimming.

As we swam in the covered pool, I looked through the windows at people walking to the shops wearing coats, hats and scarves. The display showed the temperatures outside and inside the building, and in each pool. Outside, at four o’clock in the afternoon, it was dark, and freezing. Inside, just on the other side of a thin pane of glass, it was bright and steamy, and we moved around in the water freely.

It made me wonder about the different worlds we all live in. How in the same moment in time, in the same place, different people occupy totally different worlds. How it might feel to have serious depression, for example, to be wearing a hat and scarf and protecting yourself as best you can from the cold and darkness while everyone else is walking around in swimming costumes. How it might feel to be having some kind of delusions, feeling that you are swimming as the other people around you walk down the street. There is no communication through the glass, at best sign language, but really, the two worlds sit one inside the other. It wouldn’t occur to someone in the swimming pool to try and communicate with someone in the street. And so, if we choose to, we can observe other people’s lives, from the outside, from within our own bubble.

Although the metaphor doesn’t technically stretch very far, it struck me in a physical way, feeling the warmth and looking at the cold. It made me aware of what an effort it is to really enter someone else’s world; after all if we are warm, we are warm, and here is someone telling us that they are freezing? That the world is actually a freezing place? It reminded me that everyone is right. It reminded me not to underplay the difficulty and importance of opening up wide and listening.

Rate this post?

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...