I have been reading news paper articles about lonely death among elderly persons and discussions regarding how to treat mothers with baby cart in public transportation in Japan, and gained serious concerns toward how selfish we have become in our modern society. These articles make me think why we have so many “unhappy” people in one of the richest countries like Japan. So, where is the “unhappiness” coming from? What can we do to be simply “happy”? I found a Dalai Lama’s quote about compassion being helpful.
“The ultimate source of a happy life is warm-heartedness. This means extending to others the kind of concern we have for ourselves. On a simple level we find that if we have a compassionate heart we naturally have more friends. And scientists today are discovering that while anger and hatred eat into our immune system, warm-heartedness and compassion are good for our health.”
In the course of our projects, I sometimes struggle with the negative social perception toward anyone who don’t fit into “NORMAL” or “YOUNG AND HEALTHY.” The term of “other people” whom our society still treats as “not normal” will soon be used for labeling ourselves due to our normal aging process. Aging is not an option, it happens to all of us. As we age, our physical ability will slow down.
I understand that aging causes fear for all of us, however we need to remind ourselves that “Aging is not a disease,” it is a natural process and happens to all of us. We should learn to be compassionate to others, and try to “include” rather than “exclude” the people who are labeld as “different from normal” as a part of our social web. Having sincere compassions can be challenging at the begining , yet we can at least start to consiously think about “how we want to be treated by others when we no longer young, healthy, and independent.”
Mother Teresa also address the concept of compassion with using the term “love.”
“The opposite of love is not hatred, but indifference.”
We can also easily fall into “not normal” by unexpected accidents or sickness regardless of our age. It is my hope that we can first learn to pay attentions and interested in people around us as “a person just like me,” rather than “nameless faces who I do not know.” In our busy life, we still have enough time to pay attention to others, don’t we?
