Understanding

A close friend of mine maintains that people can never understand one another. He argues that because a person has never experienced the world in the same way as another, they can never truly understand what it means to be that person, the way they’ve felt, why they’ve done what they have, why they made the choices they made.

I always resented him for that. I’ve always believed I was sympathetic and at times empathetic; I thought I could understand what it meant to be in another person’s shoes. In fact, the same close friend I mentioned earlier has called me “The Ear.” He said my best quality is that I am an understanding person.

To me, that seemed like a double standard. How can he say that I understand people when he doesn’t think people understand each other to begin with? I never actually understood, ironically, how it was even possible.

I think for a long time I’ve been taking people understanding each other for granted; I thought it was easy to take into account the situation a person was in. I also thought it was easy for everyone else. Empathy and sympathy aren’t particularly hard… are they?

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Now I’m not sure whether I’m really good at empathizing or really bad at it.

When my friend told me that people couldn’t really understand each other I was taken aback in a sense. If empathizing and sympathizing are so complicated, at least as he says, then what have I been doing so far?

As far as I was concerned I had been doing a pretty darn good job of it. The more I thought about his beliefs though, the more I had to question myself.

“Am I superficial? I don’t think so… No… I’m not… But wait am I actually?”

Maybe I’m not. Maybe I can simply understand a person and get to what they feel without hesitation or difficulty.

Or maybe I can’t. Maybe I’m so incapable of doing so that I’m blind to it. Maybe I’m so selfish with my own concerns that my “empathy” is really just an attempt to make someone else’s problem about me. Maybe I’m not as good a person as I think I am…