Writing practice: continue with opening soliloquy for cat
CAT
[first, a diversion]
What do you do when you think it would be instructive to empathize with another or another group, but they aren’t interested in doing the same? Or you think, “What’s the point of understanding them better, since they don’t want to understand the opposing group any better? They only want to see things from their own perspective.” Is there any real value? I’d say yes, since understanding the other yields benefits that aren’t wasted if they don’t want to do the same – you needn’t view it as a means to understand and accommodate their behavior, but as a means to insights in how to constrain their behavior. Maybe it’s like playing chess – if you understand the game so much better than your opponent, and understand your opponent so much better than he understands you, isn’t that a tremendous advantage in using his ignorance against him in order to shrink his world and constrain his behavior and, ultimately, make him recognize his own failings when facing assured defeat?
But one barrier, which is perhaps the hardest to overcome, is that it might be so awful to try to empathize with the other. But that is, perhaps, simply an issue of choosing how you think about a problem and whether you can find a motivation to proceed. And maybe this relates to the ego, where we perhaps by nature only ever care to be ourselves (even if we’d like to be ourselves but in vastly difference circumstances). But if that remains a barrier, then it’s at least an internal barrier. But it’s funny because it generally feels so good and natural only to see things from our own perspective, so it’s very foreign and unsettling to try to do that for someone else. But maybe that’s part of great writing, maybe it’s an act of great humility to be able to set aside one’s own ego and assume the ego of another.
Anyway, the first barrier – choosing to try to imagine oneself with another’s perspective – is internal, the second barrier – actually being able to do this – is also internal in that it’s a skill of the imagination that probably needs to be developed, and finally the third barrier is external – do you know enough about the other to be able to imagine oneself from his perspective.
[ok, that’s all for today. maybe i’ll get to the cat tomorrow]