Empathy as a Strategy of Resilience

My middle kid, a fifth grader, is big into Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived series. It’s historical fiction writ small, where kid characters—about the age of the series’s average readers—find themselves smack in the midst of some of the worst real events humanity has ever faced. The books can be singularly intense and hyper-local. For example, did you know that in 1916, a great white shark swam up a creek in New Jersey? Other books in the series take on broad, well-known—nearly mythic, in some cases—deeply tragic events: The Destruction of Pompeii, 79 AD; The San Francisco Earthquake, 1906; The Japanese Tsunami, 2011. Her latest installment? The Black Death, 1348.

What good does it do to write what’s already been written? It was devastating, shocking, unreal.

But, as the breadth of devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene, in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in particular, became more and more apparent to the rest of the country, my child asked, “Do you think Lauren Tarshis will write an I Survived…about Hurricane Helene now?”

I was at a genuine loss. “I don’t know, kiddo,” I said. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

To See Others

In Chattanooga, TN, where we live, Helene brought a day, a night, and another half-day of steady rain. Schools were closed and so was the city government, out of an abundance of caution. Chattanooga was spared—it weathered the storm not so much in its eye but more in its elbow.

North, above Great Smoky Mountains National Park, dams broke and homes slid away in muddy torrents. East, in mountainous North Carolina—Asheville, Boone, and surrounding environs—well…on the one hand, what good does it do to write what’s already been written? It was devastating, shocking, unreal.

On the other hand, slabs of I-40 seemed to melt in plain view, a kind of objective correlative for the people who live there, whose roots go further down than the bases of the mountains.

For the first time, just barely, we began to see the shapes of other peoples’ pain.

Hurricane Helene reminded me of this: Every summer in high school, I went on week-long mission trips with my youth group. We ended up in Iowa one July, a year after the Mississippi River had barreled through on a livid tear, grabbed what it wanted from as far beyond its banks as it could reach, and slung it all into the Gulf of Mexico.

And there we were, unskilled kids, half of us in love with the other half, blitzed on hormones and Jolly Ranchers, twisted by Monty Python and Douglas Adams, suddenly tasked with installing drywall in the homes of real people. Who were surely, though a year had passed, still in the midst of the greatest shock and pain they’d ever known.

The trip was only a week. Half the time was dedicated to teaching us what drywall even was, not to mention how to install it.

But there’s no way that we weren’t, on some level, the bearers of a great humiliation. We don’t get pros? the people on whose homes we worked must have thought. Living without actual walls in one’s home because a huge river stole them, whether or not we were the ones to fix them, seemed fundamentally wrong. For the first time, just barely, we began to see the shapes of other peoples’ pain.

Empathy as a Strategy

In this moment, when empathy is being cast as a “sin” to justify the persecution of our fellow humans, it’s especially important to plant and nurture the ability to understand and share the feelings of others.

And a properly tuned sense of social justice—broadly, the notion that wrongs must be righted, suffering should be alleviated—begins in the imagination.

Imagination, more than knowledge, seems connected to our intrinsic senses of self. When we imagine something, we’re automatically invested in it—intentionally, deeply, personally. And we don’t, perhaps can’t, imagine in the abstract.

Rather, when we imagine, we create specific what-ifs: conditions in our minds populated not with color but “water that looked like chocolate milk”; not with sound, but with “a metallic skree.” We create characters, too, people in our minds who behave like Mother, Grandpa, Uncle Mike.

Through her reading of Tarshis’s stuff—in fact, at Tarshis’s imaginative prompting—my child can imagine just how difficult it would be to survive a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami. Self-obsessed high-school kids can begin to sense the agony not only of the people impacted by one particular Mississippi River flood but also of heartbreak in any circumstance in which people suffer.

Imagination, in other words, in relation to the alleviation of the suffering of others, is transferrable. Scalable, too, as it applies to the man by the freeway with the please help sign, up to and including huge swaths of countryside ripped open by climate disasters. To imagine in this way begets empathy. And empathy distills into a robust, cultivated compassion that initiates thoughtful, effective, cooperative responses in the real world.

To be sure, there are a million ways the above could go horribly sideways. From disaster profiteers to doom prophets to plain old rubberneckers who won’t get out of the way, we’re still human and, if we have any pure desire to help our neighbors in trouble, we’re tempted by an equal amount of desire, if not more it seems, to capitalize upon them in their vulnerable states.

But it must be that if we can take people into the imaginative spaces in our minds, if we can use empathy, we emerge with them closer to whole together, robust and rebuilt.

For more on this topic:

We All Have Value: Changing Relationships Through Radical Empathy

The Appalachian Nonprofits Helping in Helene