A Host of Compassionate Angels[1]
"The Fall of the Rebel Angels," a painting by Pieter Bruegel inspired by the same poem which inspired the title to this essay.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Fall_of_the_Rebel_Angels.JPG
I’m a compassionate person, right? I hope I am, anyway. I recycle. I gave a dollar to that homeless guy on 6th street. Granted, it was partially because he was drumming on an upside down plastic tub and it reminded me of Angel from the musical Rent, but still. A dollar is a dollar. Just yesterday, I spent two hours on Skype with my sister, her frustration with fractions awakening in me “a desire to help” (Dass, 56). In addition, when I realized that, due to a sad lack of math skills, helping, in the literal, let-me-teach-you-about-fractions sense, was out of the question, I did a superb job of offering “[my] own empathy, [my] own experience, [and my] own understanding of how if feels” to be utterly baffled by mathematics.
In Jonathan Larson's musical "Rent," Angel is a cross-dressing street-drummer whom the street-drummer on 6th street reminded me of.
http://dctheatrescene.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/rentfeature.jpg
So if I am SO compassionate, why is it that I sat here for two hours unable to think of a suitable story to illustrate the role compassion has played in my life? Really, it was the saddest thing ever. And quite a blow to my self esteem. The way I saw it, my sad shortage of ideas meant one of two things:
1. The well of creativity that inhabits my mind had finally run dry, and I would soon be forced to search for inspiration outside of myself, possibly through a muse. I wasn’t enthusiastic about my chances of finding a muse either. The introduction to Alice in Wonderland makes it sound as though Carroll found his muse, Alice Liddell, quite easily. Now, maybe they don’t make ‘em like they used to back in 1862, but I myself haven’t seen a wealth of girls running around who are “loving as [dogs]… gentle as [fawns]… and courteous to all” (Carroll, 12).
Alice Liddell, Carroll's inspiration for Alice in Wonderland.
http://www.sodabob.com/Photos/Photographers/Carroll/Alice_Liddell_Age7.jpg
2. I was just one of those sad, unnatural people who think they possess an average degree of compassion (as my first paragraph implies) but is actually just an android, like Phil Resch, sure that they’re human but actually just robots “imitating… a superior life-form” (Dick, 134).
Obviously neither of these ideas was remarkably appealing to me, so I spent a good deal of those two hours unhappily writing page after page of angry complaints against writers block. Anyhow, towards the end of my two hours of agony, miracles of compassion began to occur. A host of compassionate angels invaded the Andrews lobby, offering me comfort, distraction, and (best of all) inspiration.
Angel number 1 was Waytao. He was strolling through the Andrews Dormitory lobby, all short and smiley and Chinese, obviously headed for the sweet-smelling laundry room in the basement, when he spotted me looking distressed, curled up in a painful ball on one of the sturdy black leather couches that line the Andrews lobby like small furniture armies. He dropped his laundry basket with a loud thud and threw himself onto the couch- soldier across from me.
“What”, he asked “Are you doing?”
Well. In seventh grade, my mother bought me a book called Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens by Richard Carlson. Like most of the other self-help books she threw at me over the years, I didn’t read it. However, to humor her, I look briefly at the first chapter, which advised me “not to throw up on [my] friends,” (Carlson, 1) referring to that lovely form of extraneous information known as emotional vomit.
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sweat-Small-Stuff-Teens/dp/0786885971
So, I debated whether or not to burden Waytao with my emotional vomit. I guess you could say I attempted to be compassionate by keeping my troubles to myself. But, like the word vomit of Mean Girls, there was no holding it in.
“OH. MY. GOD. WAYTAO. I DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO,” I began (not so calmly). Word vomit, emotional vomit, you name it and Waytao, my first compassionate angel, experienced it in a breaking tidal wave formed of wasted time and imminent frustration. And, like the compassionate person that he is, he listened to it all.
“Lauren. That is very sad.” He sat there for a bit, thinking, as I typed a few more irate paragraphs about the perils of writers block.
Suddenly his face lit up. “AHA!” he exclaimed. “I know EXACTLY what you can write about.”
“What?!?!” I inquired desperately, dying to put something on paper that I wouldn’t immediately have to delete.
“You can write about my 21st birthday,” he said triumphantly.
He then proceeded to tell me a long, drawn out, detailed story of the events that had occurred on this momentous night. I relaxed. I laughed. And then, finally, when the story was over, I asked him what part of that story illustrated compassion.
Waytao looked at me in a perplexed manner. “Oh, yeah!” he said. “At the end of the night, one of my friends carried me all the way back to my dorm. If that’s not compassion, I don’t know what is.” And with that closing remark, he wished my luck and left to start what he had originally intended to do: wash clothes.
Now, obviously there was no way I was using his tale of drunkeness to illustrate compassion, though writing the story from his perspective would have been… interesting? In any case, the point was that Waytao had been compassionate enough to my plight that he sat with me for a full twenty minutes, a span of time in which he might have been able to an plethora of laundry, just to cheer me up. Compassionate? I think so.
Not two minutes after Waytao had gone did Angels number two and three appear, in the form of Philip and Reuben. When they asked what I was doing, I gave them a weak smile and just said “Homework”. They took in the scene: Me, curled up on a soldier-couch, surrounded by books, nursing a bag of pretzels, my computer sitting stupidly on my lap with a single paragraph adorning the screen, written in all caps so that it couldn’t possibly be mistaken as progress of any kind.
“You need a break,” they said. Then, the stole my computer and looked up some ridiculous Korean pop song, called up a friend (angel number 4), and performed for me a choreographed dance, explaining to me that they were starting a boy band.
I nestled into my chair, idly tapping at the keys, alternately reading stories on mylifeisaverage.com and listening to “Tik Tok” by Kesha in an attempt to find my inner P. Diddy, since I still seemed unable to muster up creativity of my own and was starting to worry that I’d have to… errr… borrow (coughstealcough) from someone, P. Diddy appearing to me in my semi-wretched state a good choice.
“You can do it!” said Tara.
“We believe in you!” agreed Harold.
“You are my sunshine!” reminded Samyu
“ We love you!” finished Sunayna.
After a bit they too left to enjoy what was left of their Sunday nights. But the block was broken. I remembered incident after incident where I had shown compassion towards another being. Some of these incidents are cited in my first paragraph. But as I prepared to launch into a story of my awesome, human capability to be compassionate, my insane “[impulse] to care” (Dass, 11), I thought about the events of the night, about the compassion that my friends had shown me, about the comfort that they had offered, despite the fact that they all probably had better things to do with their time.
I wrote about them instead (obviously). They inspired me. No need for P. Diddy, or Alice, or whatever other muse I had considered over the last couple of hours. Nope, all I needed was some good old-fashioned compassion and the best friends anyone could ever ask for.
So how am I going to spread the compassion? Well. Look at what my friends accomplished with just twenty minutes each. They managed to cheer me up AND inspire an entire paper. What if I spent twenty minutes every day devoted to acts of compassion? What if we ALL spent twenty minutes every day devoted to acts of compassion? Dass says that we often “find ourselves wondering if [people could be compassionate]… more or even most of the time”. I know I think about it a lot… compassion, that often wasted talent that all humans posses. So my plan of action in the compassion sphere, inspired by one crazy night of stress and angels, is to start out conscientiously devoting twenty minutes a day to acts of compassion, slowly incorporating these acts into my life so that after awhile, my “mind [will stop] wrestling with the impulses of [my] heart” and compassion will not only be my natural instinct but my actual response to situations of need. Hopefully, I can lead by example. Hopefully, people will pay it forward. Hopefully, I can inspire a few more angels.
With any luck, my action plan can help me learn to always listen to and follow my heart as opposed to my head, and become more compassionate, as well as inspire others to do the same.
http://ny-image3.etsy.com/il_430xN.27498083.jpg
Word count without quotes: 1551
Word count with quotes: 1623
[1] Title inspired by John Milston’s “Paradise Lost”.
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