Sympathy for the one Who Writes?

Grasshopper at Norfolk Park, Paddington, London, GB

Photo by Jonathan Acuña

Sympathy for the one Who Writes?

What’s really going on?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.

School of English

Faculty of Social Sciences

Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Sunday, July 14, 2019

Post 328

        Sympathy can be defined as “the perception, understanding, and reaction to the distress or need of another life form. This empathic concern is driven by a switch in viewpoint, from a personal perspective to the perspective of another group or individual who is in need” (Wikipedia.Com, 2019). But should sympathy be called as so when you start trying to perceive, comprehend and react to the distress you may be undergoing?

          As a very season educator, who has been in the teaching business for over 25 years, I have come to a point in my career that it seems like a stuck and stagnated spot in my professional life timeline. It looks like there are moments in which the life of an expert becomes a void, a sort of an empty cavity that cannot be filled with just being in a classroom for a monthly wage. This vacuity is just taking over your great moments in class when teaching, and then everything is nothing but a puzzling crossroad that presents a dilemma for you to solve to go on. Have you felt like this before?

          I’m not sure you whether you have listened to the 1968 song by Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (Jagger & Keith, 1968), but if you have, revisiting the lyrics can be a good moment to realize a few things. Not certain if my reader can be a religious person or an atheist, you get to a point in which you question why it is that everything you are trying to materialize is not yet happening or is somehow slipping away. The lyrics of the song refer to a “puzzling game” and what its “nature” is, a game that is driving you off the wall because you cannot really identify a way out. But is this “puzzling game” just a fancy, an urge of your imaginative brain and mind that everything is really going wrong? And for those of you who are religious, is this a caprice of the devil, who simply wants to make you feel that your life is going downhill?

          Why am I talking of all these things? The answer is simple; at some point we are bound to feel that things are not OK and that everything is doing down the drain. Yet, this is not true. As someone with a growth mindset, you just have to look for ways to make your professional life shine again and make your teaching life more enjoyable than before. And in my very personal case, going back to my writing, learning something new while taking a course, working hard to achieve professional goals, and discussing academically with peers can provide us with a new sense of fulfillment.

          Do we then have to be sympathetic with ourselves? Sympathy is a human need, and there is no reason why we cannot be sympathetic and empathic with what we perceive and comprehend and how we react to the distress one undergoes. If you are a religious person, prayers can be good for our souls, especially when you family and friends can also give you a hand. And if you are an atheist, this is just a vacuum that can be cleaned with some positive thinking where family and friends can also be handy.

References

Jagger, M., & Keith, R. (1968). Sympathy for the Devil [Recorded by R. Stones]. London, England.

Wikipedia.Com. (2019, May 13). Retrieved from Sympathy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy