Grateful Compassion: The Courage to Imagine and Take Action

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Dalai Lama

When someone tells you about a struggle they face, a loss they’ve experienced, or uncertainty they are navigating, how often do you think or say: “I can’t imagine…” ?

The courage to imagine another person’s suffering is the courage to start understanding it. 

During the 21st Century, empathy has received a lot of attention, and rightly so. To empathize with someone is to “feel with them.” When we feel with people they feel seen and that is a powerful affirmation. But as a practitioner of gratefulness, you are invited to do more by being compassionate.

Compassion drives social change because it causes you to recognize that another person’s pain is also your problem.

Compassion means “to suffer with.” Like empathy, you suffer with someone because you are willing to connect to their pain. But, rather than distinguish their pain from yours, compassion says this is our suffering and we’ll take it on together. Compassion drives social change because it causes you to recognize that another person’s pain is also your problem. You see yourself in them because you can, and you do, imagine what this is like. 

We are transformed by compassion because someone steps into our situation and helps us transform it. I first experienced this when I was bullied as a kid. I was socially awkward, a self-righteous tattletale, and I made no effort whatsoever with my peer group. I had the energy of an old soul, which made me an easy target for teasing. In 7th grade, it all came to a head. Over lunch one February afternoon, I was taunted ruthlessly while I ate. Something in me knew a bad day was about to unfold. As I left the lunchroom, a kid in my class, with frankly not much greater social standing or likeability than me, decided to beat me up. 

My mom picked me up from school shortly after the attack happened. I was bloodied and had a broken nose.  I saw she was distraught when she saw me. She felt my pain and humiliation, and I knew it. Her empathy and kind words gave me the courage to get through a minor surgery to repair my nose. But her compassion changed the rest of my education because she took action and fought to create a safe environment for me. Her fight was uphill because bullying was mostly normalized in those days.

Perhaps like nothing else, compassion beautifully communicates I feel you, you are not alone, and this is ours to make right. But gratefulness gives you the courage to be open-hearted and to recognize that all forms of systemic oppression, injustice, disenfranchisement, hatred, and many hardships in life can be transformed if we see ourselves in the lives of others. How does it do that?

Honoring, appreciating, and celebrating what life gave you versus someone else — like a strong web of relationships or a loving family — also requires the recognition that it could have been otherwise.

The daily practice of grateful living helps us recognize all that is impermanent in life, including things we may take for granted like the freedom to vote, financial security, housing, and our next meal. Honoring, appreciating, and celebrating what life gave you versus someone else — like a strong web of relationships or a loving family — also requires the recognition that it could have been otherwise. You are not special because of what you have received that someone else didn’t. Knowing that you are not more worthy than another allows you to apply a compassionate gaze to other people’s situations. You understand that situation could easily be yours, and it may one day become your situation if you pretend it isn’t your problem. 

Compassion is not pity, but understanding put into action. Gratefulness wakes you up to the gifts you have received in life and helps you understand they aren’t guaranteed. Compassion invites you to take action from that understanding and to recognize that everyone is worthy of a life of joy, belonging, hope, and dignity. A grateful perspective makes it clear that these are never negotiable — they are the essentials.

So the next time you witness a struggle, imagine what it might be like for the person carrying this challenge. And the next time you share a hardship and someone says they can’t imagine what you’re going through, invite them to try. Together, you may find the way forward for all of us. 

Photo by J W

Joe Primo, Grateful Living

Joe Primo is the CEO of Grateful Living. He is a passionate speaker and community-builder whose accomplishments made him a leading voice on resilience and adversity. Gratefulness for life, he believes, is foundational to discovering meaning and the only response that is big enough and appropriate for the plot twists, delights, surprises, and devastation we encounter along the way. A student of our founder since his studies at Yale Divinity School, Joe is committed to advancing our global movement and making the transformational practice of grateful living both accessible to all and integral to communities and places of belonging. His TED talk, “Grief is Good,” reframed the grief paradigm as a responsive resource. He is the author of “What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids About Death and Dying” and numerous articles.

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