Fighting Tiger

I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed this mental phenomena or if it even has a name, but hopefully I’ll describe it in a way that makes sense.

You might regularly pass along a street and so the facades of buildings become familiar. Then for some reason, an appointment, the purchase of a specific item, you enter one of the buildings and it is no longer a facade facing a street, but a real(ised), three-dimensional space filled with people, objects and stories. From that point on, whenever you pass along that street, you can comprehend the form of the building, and as such it becomes far easier to imagine what might be happening inside. The physical world is still the same size, but somehow the representation of its space in your head and imagination has become larger.

This is not to say that you can’t imagine what is behind a facade without walking through it, but imagining becomes far easier once you have a collection of the real in your mind to draw from.

I feel that it’s the same with people. Names and faces are facades, but until we interact with another person’s mental and emotional space, it is much harder to imagine what that person’s life is like. Of course, once you begin to know a person, it is like rooms in their self open up in your mind. As with physical spaces, the more human spaces you know, makes it easier to imagine what an unknown person is experiencing and feeling.

Almost two years ago I ended up living in Finland. An imagined land of snow and Moomintrolls was now a three-dimensional space of parks and lakes and islands and streets, cafes, kitchens and living rooms, workspaces and tram-tracks. The abstracted population of “Suomi” became a community of real people, people with stories and feelings and goals and failures. They were mothers, fathers, coworkers, customers, bank-tellers, friends and strangers I smiled at on endless summer days as we drank cider in parks.

About a year later, back in Australia, the news of a school shooting in Jokela, a few hours north of Helsinki, really shook me. This was a violent act taking place in a culture that I had come to know, even though I hadn’t visited the town. I could imagine the faces of the students, what clothes they wore and food they ate, how they spoke and interacted with their families. My exposure to people and places meant that the Jokela violence affected me far more intensely than similar incidents in the United States, a country I have never visited.

Surely this wasn’t a just way for me to react? What makes the lives of people we can’t easily imagine less valuable than those who are already “real” in our minds? Sometimes, imagining and remembering places and people I know, feels far more authentic than the empathy I can muster together for people I am _just_ imagining. Then I have to remind myself that I’m not alone in the continual practice of combining memory, place, people and imagining to understand more about the world.

As far as I can tell, this practice of imagination and empathy for people takes me one step closer to becoming compassionate in the true sense. In isolation from people, compassion is possible, but difficult. However, once you know how some individuals feel, it is far easier to feel empathy and thereby be moved to compassion towards a greater number of people.

To me, that is why travel is so important in making a person grow towards a better state of being. Countries which may have just been marketing images in a magazine now become real, living spaces full of life and smells and sound. When traveling, one is not just confronted by new spaces, they’re also meeting new people and learning their experiences and stories.

Exposed to new people and places your heart begins to stretch so it can accommodate and acknowledge these amazing new experiences and memories. Of course, once it becomes easier for your heart and mind to feel and empathise, it also becomes far easier to miss and long for the places and people you are no longer near. Despite the longing and missing, you know that you can always experience just one more place and make connections with a few more people, safe in the knowledge that your heart will stretch that little bit more.