I’ve realized that Easter is this Sunday, and I’m within the seven days countdown to assessing how well I’ve done with giving up “Separation” for Lent. Today, I paused to take within myself the experiences of my interactions with numerous people, including a co-worker, my toddler, and my puppy. Not that I can really know what it’s like to think and feel from within their skin, but I imagined what it might feel like.
It’s a fairly enlightening exercise, pretending what it may be like to be somebody else. Trying to imagine the experience of what it would be like to hold different thoughts, different feelings, and even different values-weightings on those thoughts, feelings and experiences. For example, I don’t personally relish the idea of playing with poo, but to my little puppy, it was the most fascinating thing in the world. While I shooed her away from it and cleaned it up, I replaced my disgust with the curious peek into what it may be like to have her senses, and her way of enjoying them.
I’m describing this as a very mental process, but I’ve felt it equally in my mind and my heart. I’ve been working for a long time on how to balance my empathy and desire to understand others with a need to maintain my own boundaries and identity, so this has been a project to learn new ways to strike that balance.
I don’t feel prepared to objectively rate how far I’ve come in the past few weeks. Yet come Sunday, I imagine I’ll have a good idea.
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