A Case for Compassion: What Happens When We Prioritize People and the Planet

By Sara J. Schairer

What would happen if the systems within our society focused on care and healing instead of growth and profit? 

In A Case for Compassion: What Happens When We Prioritize People and the Planet, Sara Schairer-a leader in the compassion field-examines five of our most influential systems: education, health care,

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885044806

Book preview

Introduction

We need $200,000 at once for a nationwide campaign to inform the American people that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.

—Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein sent the above statement in a telegram to hundreds of prominent Americans in May 1946. He urged them to help him ignite innovative, humanity-saving thinking. Another part of the telegram read, Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

He added, We scientists who released this immense power have an overwhelming responsibility in this world life-and-death struggle to harness the atom for the benefit of mankind and not for humanity’s destruction (Einstein 2017, 513).

Inspired by compassion for all of mankind, Einstein made a desperate plea for a new type of thinking.

I bet if he were alive today, he would be making that same plea.

If you’re like me, you may have learned about compassion from your parents or through a religious institution. Perhaps you heard about the Golden Rule, that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I’m from El Paso, Illinois, a small rural town in the center of the state. Growing up, I attended the local Methodist church every Sunday morning and witnessed community members endlessly supporting each other. Selfless women delivered homemade meals whenever there was a birth or death, families chipped in so that sports teams could purchase uniforms, and the local Kiwanis club brought meals and gifts to those who needed extra support over the holidays.

When I look back, though, I realize I didn’t fully understand compassion until I was twenty-seven years old because I hadn’t truly suffered.

That changed the morning of Monday, August 9, 2004, when the phone rang and startled me awake.

I scrambled to disentangle myself from the bedsheets and stumbled to the phone. Hello? I mumbled, still half asleep. Since this was the house phone, I didn’t know who was calling. I certainly had no idea this phone call would be the kind everyone prays they won’t receive.

My mom’s voice shook as she said with hesitation, Sara, there’s been an accident.

My heart dropped.

She then followed with, Your dad has been killed.

Dad had been out for his morning jog on the country road near my parents’ home. He was struck from behind by a truck and instantly died. We later learned that the driver had fallen asleep while returning home after her night shift.

I don’t remember how the call ended, but I do remember that a few moments later, I heard a loud, earth-shattering wail from upstairs. My brother, Steve, and his wife lived in the unit above me and my then-husband, and my sister had called him next. Steve is my big brother, not only because he’s five-and-a-half years older but because he is a solid and intimidating six-foot-one. His cries seemed to shake the walls, and he surely rattled awake most of our neighbors. I crawled up the stairs in my bathrobe and didn’t make it to the top before he saw me. We both cried out in anguish.

Most of that morning was a blur. I remember purchasing plane tickets, packing, and calling my manager at work. When we arrived at the airport, Steve bought tissues for me because I couldn’t stop crying. We arrived in Chicago, and as we waited for our bags, he calmly assured me I could feel whatever I needed to feel and do whatever I needed to do for myself, no matter what anyone else said. I leaned on that sage advice for the next several hours, days, and months. We rented a car, drove over two hours to our parents’ home, and fell into the arms of my sister, mom, aunts, and uncles.

I can’t begin to describe the immediate outpouring of love from my hometown. I remember familiar faces coming in and out of the house at all hours of the day, delivering food, keeping us stocked with toilet paper, dropping off flowers, and offering hugs. Even though they were grieving my dad, too, I remember them as strong, warm, and comforting. Friends from college and childhood drove for hours to attend the memorial service. That week we received hundreds of cards and letters from people who shared their favorite memories of my dad or told us how he had impacted their lives.

Because that was my first experience of gut-wrenching, life-altering, heart-stopping suffering, it was also my first experience of receiving life-giving, heart-filling, mind-altering compassion.

I didn’t understand until many years later that you can’t have compassion without suffering.

A few years after my dad’s accident, I faced an excruciating and unwanted divorce that left me in even more anguish. When my daughter, Hannah, was nine months old, my husband told me he didn’t think he loved me anymore. Five months later, he moved out. The perfect life I had carefully crafted for myself instantly fell apart.

During Hannah’s long naps, I usually distracted myself with daytime television while I sat miserably on the couch. All attempts to restart my career had failed thanks to the financial crisis of 2008. Boredom, anxiety, depression, and loneliness swept over me.

Then I watched an episode of Ellen that changed everything.

On this particular day, Ellen DeGeneres interviewed author Wayne Dyer, and he was talking about compassion. Dyer said that compassion is the most important lesson to teach our children because compassion can solve the social problems of the world.

Those words instantly opened my eyes and my heart to the power of compassion, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That evening, as I continued to mull over Dyer’s words, it occurred to me that the adjective compassionate could be rewritten as two words—compassion it—a verb. It reminded me of Nike’s Just Do It or the phrase Google it. I saw it in simple white lowercase letters on a black background. I immediately imagined it as a bumper sticker and started the process of trademarking it.

The light in my heart, which had been dimmed for months, began to flicker. My dull and foggy brain began to clear.

I postponed the trademark for three years before I had the courage to create the first batch of stickers. It took me that long to get my derailed life back on track. During those years, I practiced compassioning it, and I found that when I brought compassion into the mix, life became smoother and sweeter.

I compassioned it on the freeway and assumed the person who had cut me off was in a hurry as opposed to a reckless jerk. I compassioned it with my boss and assumed that he was snippy because of something at home instead of believing he was an unreasonable manager. I compassioned it with my barista and cut her some slack when she seemed grumpy and made the incorrect drink. I didn’t think, She’s an incompetent human!

Even while suffering through a painful and unwanted divorce, I noticed that when I compassioned it and tried on my ex-husband’s perspective, I had the best outcomes. I’m not saying I always compassioned it with him, but it seemed to work wonders when I did. For example, when we would argue about something related to Hannah, I’d remember that he, too, is her parent and loves her. That loosened my tight grip on Hannah and allowed me to more easily accept my role as co-parent with fifty-fifty custody.

Those years of compassioning it helped me realize how the simple phrase could be life changing. Once I felt like myself again, a tremendous sense of urgency prompted me to introduce those stickers to the world as soon as possible. My father’s death gave me the acute awareness that my own life could end at any moment, and I didn’t want compassion it to die with me.

The phrase eventually became the nonprofit Compassion It, and its mission is to inspire compassionate actions and attitudes. Compassion It believes in a world where compassion is practiced by every person, for every person, on every day. Our trainings on mindfulness, compassion, and self-compassion have reached tens of thousands of people around the world.

Ten years after introducing compassion it to the world, I’m still as passionate as I was when I heard Dyer talking to DeGeneres. I’ve been a Stanford-trained compassion facilitator for nearly a decade and have had the immense privilege of teaching people around the world, from all walks of life. I’ve facilitated trainings for incarcerated individuals, elementary school children, college students, Big Tech leaders, educators, mothers, salespeople, health-care providers, and so many more.

I’ve encouraged thousands of people to prioritize compassion and self-compassion in their lives, and I’m grateful to be offering tools that help individuals cope during these challenging times. However, at this point in my career, I’m taking a step back and looking at the larger picture. When I zoom out, I can clearly see that our institutions and systems, not just individuals, need to prioritize compassion. What makes me come to that conclusion?

• Our schools don’t offer the support our struggling children need. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which issued a Declaration of a National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health in October 2021, Rates of childhood mental health concerns and suicide rose steadily between 2010 and 2020 and by 2018, suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages ten to twenty-four (2021).

• Workplaces don’t engage and support employees; as a result, many people are leaving their jobs. In 2021, an average of more than four million workers quit their jobs each month. This phenomenon is now known as The Great Resignation (Society for Human Resource Management 2022).

• Our criminal justice system is failing us. The Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research reports that the United States has nearly 2.07 million people behind bars, which means that 629 out of every 100,000 individuals are incarcerated. To put that into context, the next closest nations are Rwanda (580 per 100,000), Turkmenistan (576), El Salvador (564), and Cuba (510) (Fair and Walmsley 2021).

• Our profit-hungry health-care system drives providers to burnout and moral injury, which affects patient outcomes. Despite spending nearly twice as much money per person as other wealthy nations, our health-care system only ranks eleventh—behind Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, the UK, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, France, Switzerland, and Canada (Schneider et al. 2021).

You might be scratching your head and thinking, This woman is crazy. She thinks compassion can solve those problems?

Trust me. I’ve heard that before. Some people believe compassion is just a soft, fluffy, nice-to-have virtue. They think it weakens the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations and systems. They don’t view compassion as