View from the North 40: The greasy gut-bomb called empathy

In case you are wondering, sympathy is defined as feeling compassion, sorrow for another person, and empathy is being able to sense other people’s emotions combined with the ability to put yourself in that person’s place.

I like to think of it as that we feel sympathy in the heart and empathy in the gut.

While I have a normal human capacity for sympathy, it’s my overactive empathy disorder that I always have to keep in check.

For instance, despite the fact that I once sold a horse primarily because he reminded me too much of my worst traits, I try to have empathy when it comes to horses but not get sucked in too deep because they are shameless con artists who will take advantage of any weakness. People? They just rattle me like a tight ping pong ball in a little metal roll cage.

When my husband, John, and I were in the big city the other day we had a lot of choices for food from cheap fast food to expensive sit down, but we ended up settling on a kind of expensive fast food joint because we really wanted their onion rings.

We ordered and paid, then sat waiting patiently for those onion rings only to have the kid who took our order walk out to our table to tell us that they were out of onion rings, but they would happily substitute their fries.

Let me tell you, unlike their excellent onion rings the fries at this place were traditionally sub-par.

I wanted to chew him out for not keeping on top of this stuff. I wanted to demand a refund and go someplace cheaper and faster with better fries. I wanted to at least ask for a refund of the extra charge for the onion rings. So I really laid into the guy: “Oh, dude, we came here just for those onion rings. Fries will be fine, though.”

Too much empathy got in my way.

The young knucklehead looked like he was working to the peak of his mental acuity and the only things between him and certain failure were the solid backup from his co-workers and a cash register that automatically calculated change.

However, I’d been that nose-picker in my youth, and knew that given time and proper experience, he could make it safely out of this stage. I and about a billion other people alive today once managed to evolve from nose-picking morons into reasonably adulting grownups.

Then the fries, those crappy fries, arrived and I was ready to crucify him all over again for not staying on top of the food items currently available to customers, but I had committed myself to this path of empathy — and those fries weren’t getting any younger.

Stupid empathy. Whatever.

Later that night I was feeding the horses and saw that they hadn’t eaten all their hay from that morning. I would’ve been worried, but judging by their eager expressions and the way they were sniffing each pitchfork full of hay that dropped into their manger, they were hunting alfalfa that wasn’t there.

Their last hay bale had averaged about 40 percent alfalfa mixed in with the grass, but this bale was pure good-quality grass hay.

Normally, I would’ve used this as, not so much a learning moment, but as a sarcasm moment to harass them for their greediness as if they could understand plain English, but my gut was still trying to digest all that greasy-fries-coated empathy.

I just leaned on my pitchfork and said, “I know. I know. I really wanted those onion rings, too.”

——

To be fair to me, I sold that horse because the traits we shared were laziness and an unfortunate lack of intelligence. I just couldn’t figure out how to work with that. Fortunately for him, he possessed two traits I don’t have: a sweet nature and a pretty face, so he found a good home in the end at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.