When I was younger, people would ask a friend of mine what she wanted to do when she “grew up” and she used to say, “STW.”

Save the world.

I admired this friend very much.  Her resolute determination.  Her absolute adherence to rightness and wrongness and her determination, above all, to mold wrongness into rightness.

I don’t keep in touch with this friend, anymore, but I have no doubt she’s out there STWing at this very moment.  Her conviction was that strong and slightly contagious.

Somewhere, in my brain, there lives an idea that one must be wholly and unequivocally committed to their point of view in order for that point of view to (1) be taken seriously and (2) be right.  I battle that idea in my head almost daily.

When I was younger, I was incredibly passionate about the things I believed and felt.  I just wanted to envelope those around me in the absolute certainty of my rightness. How could someone who was so personally committed to something not be right, I wanted them to think.

There was a time that I thought that everyone who didn’t ascribe to my values, either political, social, personal or religious, needed “fixing.”  I’m even a little embarrassed to admit that I engaged in a little self righteousness, as well.

I’m not sure if you’ll understand, but I think this was my trying to live without compassion.  Without empathy.  Without compromise.

I cannot live without compassion.  I cannot live without empathy.  And, as a result, I cannot live without compromise.

I’m not chiding passionate people, I’m passionate about a lot of things, still.  I’m just not so passionate that I’m unwilling to seek a middle path with the people whose opinions differ from my own.

I think if we catch ourselves slipping into the warm, insular waters of self righteousness, we should all go to the place in our head where all the people whose choices differ from ours reside.  We should look them in the eyes… and try to inevitably find their humanity.

Yes, even if they aren’t doing the same thing.

Remember, whatever they do or say or whoever they are… deep down, we want the same thing.  To love, to be loved, to feel safe, to know what happens next.  The choices we make are varied solutions to the same problems.

It’s enough for me to see all the suffering around me, in places close to me and in places so far away that I have a hard time understanding that they’re actually real, to know what living without the willingness to compromise does.

I am not uncompromising.  Nor do I wish to be.

I wish that we were all compromising.  I wish we could all look at each other and say, “I’ll tell you what… if you give me this, I’ll give you that, and we might not both be perfectly happy… but we’ll be happy still and we won’t have to worry so much about whether the people we love are going to be okay or not.”

Passion is good.

Compassion is better.

Compromise is best.

*****

P.S. Check me out, I’ve got a syndicated post on BlogHer…. share, retweet, read, or… help me bask in the self righteousness of feeling like a hot shot blogger.