Contagious Empathy
OUR FACES ARE BURIED, and I don’t mean in the sand. They’re snuggled into our machines these days as we scroll and click and finger type away. We travel into virtual lands, disconnecting from the three-dimensional one around us. I worry that we’re no longer able to walk in this world and communicate with each other one-on-one. I worry that we no longer understand how to be alone. And being alone and lonely and bored is important to us as creative people.
Henry David Thoreau wrote: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” (Of course, he had his mother do his laundry for him while living on Walden Pond, so we have to take the simplicity of his enthusiasm with a bit of an eye squint.)
Standing up to live can be difficult. It takes time and energy and an ability to see beyond ourselves. An essential part of the process is cultivating empathy. Only through living outside of ourselves can we be at our best as writers, whose job is to capture and translate humans, creatures, and details of the lived world onto the page.
As a writer you must transform language and yourself. This personal, internal transformation is as crucial to your work as is the actual writing of words.
Let’s look at the simple act of walking as the first means of transformation. It was Stanford professor Daniel Schwartz’s habit to walk around campus with his mentees as they discussed projects. And, as one of those mentees, Dr. Marily Oppezzo, put it, “One day we got kind of meta.” In 2014 the pair published a groundbreaking set of studies that look, possibly for
