"Call and Response - Empathy in Corporation"

"You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: 'This is beautiful.'" 

Le Corbusier (see more here)

My years of working with the root concepts of empathy have lead me time and time again to issues of place. I'll spare you the inchoate details and cut to the chase.

If I attend to empathy as empathy has come to be enacted, then I walk a mile in your shoes and manage to think as you think.I have come to understand that concept as being way off the mark. To even assume that I understand your feelings (as you experience your feelings) is a kind of emotional colonialism. I can't occupy your emotions without impressing my life experiences on yours.

How could that even work?

What I can do is hold a space sacred so that perhaps you can experience your circumstances in safety. Why, that's a veritable cathedral of circumstance. The question du jour of the day becomes: do we make a space sacred? Is a space always already sacred and we find ourselves slow dancing in an empathic exchange? Is a space made sacred through our recognition of each other? Our recognition of the space as being intrinsically sacred?

I think about these things.

And the thought envelopes you. 
And it embraces me.

And this is beautiful.

"Consider this: Let’s say that the space you occupy is a Jello mold and that you and your circle of family and friends – your reality team – are banana slices suspended in lemon lime goodness. Now what transpires within each banana slice is implicitly akin to the Jello, and jiggles about as the Jello jiggles. And there is a certain simplicity about this."

Le Grandtoureau (video link here)

"From the dawn of man's imagination, place has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on, that was where the god abided and spoke from if ever he spoke."

Eudora Welty (complete text here)

 

While comprehending both the conveniences and pitfalls of a Cause and Effect existence, 

here at empathinc. we prefer to live in a Call and Response Universe. 

This series is an exploration of that space. 

"Window of Opportunity"

Empathy is not only just about perceiving and acting empathically, though it would be so useful if we consistently operated out of that paradigm of behavior.

Empathy is also about space. And how we take up space. And how we recognize an Other in space. And how we might define that space as our space, perceiving the Other then as an interloper, a trespasser.

So why are we considered to be 'soft-wired' as humans to experience empathy and 'hard-wired' to be aggressive?

This is the difference between non-genderized concepts of masculine and feminine. It is not a binary to be lived out divisively but a set of embracing parameters to be lived within - and it is necessary and urgent that we open this window of opportunity wide open. We suggest Now. Now would be a good time.

RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation

The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves and grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism, has recognized that this web is intrinsically dynamic. The dynamic aspect of matter arises in quantum theory as a consequence of the wave-nature of subatomic particles, and is even more essential in relativity theory, where the unification of space and time implies that the being of matter cannot be separated from its activity. The properties of subatomic particles can therefore only be understood in a
dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation.

Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics

Photo by Mary de Wit / in2Wit / Thoughtful Information Design
Billy Schulz, Myers Park Labyrinth, "Amaze".
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