I saw a baby in the library last week. It was the first baby I had seen in months, with fat cheeks and soft wisps of hair. She was cute.
I was so lost in an upcoming math test, a discouraging bank statement and the weekly crises of young adulthood that it took my brain a couple seconds to process what a baby is.
For those privileged enough to come to a place like the University of Idaho and enjoy a traditional university experience, college is a strange slice of life. Students step outside the world for several years in order to find their place within it.
They move to a steady rhythm of studying, working, shopping, sleeping, cooking, weight lifting, partying and volunteering while surrounded by thousands of others who do similar things. The self-contained college experience leads to self-absorption. Any life that isn’t student life fades.
One loses sight of babies.
Being young makes it easy to forget how big the world is, and how little of it a single person can experience. For a variety of reasons, I don’t have access to the joy of painting, the challenges of motherhood or the innermost thoughts of a grocery store clerk.
Even without learning how to paint, bearing children or having a close relationship with a grocery store clerk, I can and should recognize that all these experiences indicate a rich and complex human condition.
It’s hard. When the guy at Winco is spacing out instead of scanning my raisin bran, I’m irritated — not empathetic.
Our society struggles to find the empathy needed to reach across differing values and life experiences. There is no national conversation about gun violence, policing or terrorism. Instead, two divergent and increasingly insular echo chambers complain about the other side.
Anybody who gets their news exclusively through social media is deep inside one of these echo chambers, and that isn’t my opinion — it’s math. Twitter and Facebook are designed to show users things they will agree with.
The amount of places in America where people can encounter, engage and empathize with views they find uncomfortable or unacceptable continues to shrink.
But Moscow, a blue dot in a sea of red, is unusual in its diversity of thought.
Here we have flower children and bible thumpers, tree-huggers and gun-clingers. We have readings at bookstores downtown. We have panel discussions at the 1912 Center. There’s that guy who shouts things in front of the library. Listen, think and empathize.
It is easy to be too busy for other people, especially when they hold discordant views. Finding the right crowd and shutting out the rest of the world is seductive, but it wastes our most valuable resource — our collective emotional trivia. We don’t have a coherent community if we cannot listen to and empathize with one another.
It starts with seeing how someone’s day is going, or asking why something matters to them.
Talk to people. Love people. Look outside yourself.
Danny Bugingo can be reached at [email protected]