A few weeks ago I visited Disney World, and for seven days in a row I experienced multiple attractions and shows, diverse foods, but, above all, endless lines to enter the attractions, even taking into account that I had fast passes, because if there is a common denominator in all Disney parks it is the large crowds. Honestly, I'm not a big fan of crowds and even try to avoid them, an almost impossible feat to achieve at Disney, but I must confess that one thing that draws my attention about Disney crowds is the diversity. People from all over the world, with different ethnicities, beliefs and religions gather around this place, all attracted by the commercial gravity of Mickey Mouse.
So, with so much time at my disposal while waiting in line for the attraction, I used my time to do what I do best: people watch.
For writers or aspiring authors like me, who have studied the art of writing, one of the most common exercises to develop writing skills is to sit in a crowded place and observe people and, based on their appearance, behavior and actions, imagine the life of that person. Where does it come from? What is your story? What did you experience as a child? Is he/she happy? Why dress like that? What are your daily challenges? And so on…
In addition to developing plotting and character creation skills for aspiring authors, one of the most surprising things I discovered about this technique is that it helps develop empathy. In the high-speed society we live in, with our set of priorities and endless to-do lists, it is harder to put yourself in someone's shoes and really understand what that person is going through, simply because they are "strangers." » and we have no interest in knowing them.
This basic, human premise about modifying our behavior toward a person based on the “known” or “unknown” label that evolved from the tribalism of our ancestors, is what could produce the need to distance ourselves from people who tend to be different from us, whether physically, ideologically, religiously or according to nationality.
But can doing this mental exercise for a few minutes really help us increase our empathy for humanity?
The author David Leviathan, in his novel Cada dia, recreates an extraordinary case, in what I can consider the most creative premise of a novel I have read in a long time, in which the protagonist, A (that's his name), wakes up every day in a different body, borrowing the life of a person during that day. The protagonist does not have a given name at birth or a specific personality based on a unique body, but rather his personality is defined by the collective experience of the different lives that “he” has embodied for a day. I put in quotes he, because the protagonist embodies men and women equally, with multiple backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual preferences or beliefs. What is very notable is that the protagonist learns to classify experiences on a very basic scale of likes and dislikes, regardless of any social prejudice or preconception, and learns to appreciate life independently of social labels, and the novel even goes further. there, questioning these social constructions.
So, while waiting in the Disney lines, I wondered if, like in David's novel Leviathan, I could borrow a person's life for a day, and if this experience would help me appreciate others and therefore , to the life.
I did a quick calculation, and living to be eighty, I could only experience less than thirty thousand lives, not even close to the number of visitors in a Disney park for one day, and to make it more meaningful, if I wanted to experience all the lives of For the 7 billion people in the world, I should not borrow a whole day, but only a fraction of a second for the rest of my life.
The truth is that we can't experience the lives of others even for a fraction of a second, but we could at least care to imagine the difficulties that people might be going through the next time we meet someone, this could help us be kinder. . And even if this exercise doesn't make us more empathetic, I want to believe that it can at least help us be more grateful for the life we're living. BittersweetYes, but unique in the end.
M. Ch. Landa
