The Strange Physics of Compassion

A difficult man, a lesson learned late, and the seven hours that might change how you treat people

I’ll tell you something I’m not proud of.

I used to run a community center on the Upper West Side — a busy place, all kinds of people coming and going. Most were warm, bright, easy company. Once in a while someone came through who was harder to place, a little “off,” and occasionally one of them — almost always a man — would draw a complaint for an unwanted advance or some inappropriate behavior. The policy was simple: one warning, and if it continued, we’d ask him to leave.

One day the job of having that conversation fell to me. The man was defensive and immovable, insisting he had a “right” to be there, and the longer he argued the angrier I got. Finally I blurted out that he needed to “grow up.”

He stopped. He looked at me sadly, and said: “You know, it’s not easy being me.” Then he turned to go.

My anger vanished in an instant — replaced by remorse, and a sudden, aching compassion for this man I had just been so amped up to kick out.

So what happened here? What kept me from seeing this man as a person from the start — and, most importantly, can this kind of compassion be cultivated, so that it’s present before we walk into tense encounters like this one?

My post-mortem of the exchange is not so flattering. I had cast him as a threat — to my authority, to my sense of propriety, to my reputation. And when we perceive someone as a threat, the instinct is to other them: to strip away the particulars until what remains is a category, a problem, a type. It is much easier to move against a category than against a person.

George Orwell caught this mechanism in himself. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he lay in wait as a sniper near the Fascist trenches. At last a man leapt out and ran along the parapet in full view — but he was half-dressed, clutching his falling trousers with both hands as he ran. Orwell didn’t shoot. A man holding up his pants, he later wrote, “isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” The abstraction “enemy” could not survive the sight of something so absurdly, ordinarily human.

That is what happened to me, too. The man I had written off broke the category with one quiet sentence. In both cases the category we’d assigned — “Fascist,” “problem” — could not survive the sight of a particular human being. But notice what the two moments share: the recognition came by accident, uninvited, at the last possible second — after the insult, with the rifle already raised. Which returns me to the question that matters most. Can we learn to see the person before the encounter turns — to have the warmth ready, instead of waiting for it to ambush us?

We tend to think of compassion as something that we have a particular quotient of; some more, some less. But the evidence seems to suggest that its actually a trainable state of mind; less like a personality trait and more like a capacity that can be deliberately built — the way the contemplative traditions always claimed, and the way a brain scanner in Wisconsin eventually confirmed.

Matthieu Ricard was a French molecular biologist who left science to become a Buddhist monk, and later a confidant of the Dalai Lama. In a now-famous experiment at the University of Wisconsin, part of a study of hundreds of advanced meditators, Ricard was hooked up to 256 sensors and asked to meditate on compassion. The instruments picked up gamma-wave activity at a level “never reported before in the neuroscience literature” — far beyond the normal range — prompting the press to crown him “the happiest man in the world.”

Ricard rejected the title. What the machine had detected, he insisted, was not happiness but compassion — the signature of a mind saturated with care directed outward. I had felt a flicker of that after my quiet rebuke, and I suspect we all have at some point. The difference is that in Ricard it was vast, stable, and available rather than accidental and fleeting. And here is the part that surprises people: such intensity of care doesn’t overwhelm or exhaust the one who feels it. It was not a wave that swept him away but a warmth he could hold — steadily, at enormous strength, without being consumed by it.

This capacity was not something Ricard was born with. Like most things worth having, it was the result of sustained effort over time. We are willing to think long-term about money — to make plans, to accept slow progress toward financial stability. But when it comes to deliberately cultivating a quality of character, we tend either to pay lip service (”I’m working on it”) or to file it under sainthood — the way of a kind of person we don’t quite identify with, and therefore excuse ourselves from becoming. Which is a strange thing to concede. We are declining to train the one capacity that would dissolve most of our conflicts before they start.

Most people — myself included — fail to seriously lean into compassion out of fear: of being overwhelmed by it, or of letting someone off the hook who hasn’t earned it. And there’s something to both. There are people who will take everything you offer and come back for more. And sometimes an uncomfortable truth genuinely needs saying — for the other person’s benefit though and not from our desire to punish.

But this thing we’re afraid of isn’t compassion at all. It’s a related state called empathic distress — what happens when someone else’s suffering doesn’t just reach us but knocks us over. Their pain becomes our pain. We’re upset, destabilized, and while we sincerely don’t want them to be suffering, we also very much don’t want to be near it. That is the state that exhausts people. Two people are now drowning instead of one.

Compassion is something else. Ricard’s — measurable, as it turned out — was so vast it could hold the pain of others without pulling him under. And this is the strange economy of the thing: those who genuinely have it don’t drain easily. The draining starts when it becomes about us.

So the door you’ve kept shut for fear of the flood doesn’t open onto a flood at all. It opens onto something you can deal with. Which means the real question was never can I afford to feel this much? but can I learn to feel it well? — a training question, not a question of temperament.

So how do you actually do it? Ricard’s practice was to meditate on compassion in widening circles — first toward people he already loved, then toward neutral people, then toward the difficult ones, then toward all beings. Slow, deliberate, unglamorous. Day by day, year by year, for decades. But the same research found that a far more modest commitment moves the needle: twenty minutes a day for three weeks. That’s seven hours total. Four hundred and twenty minutes to change the way you meet other people. Would you take that trade?

I did eventually reconcile with the man I asked to leave my center. It was awkward, and it came far too late to spare either of us the encounter itself. But that is precisely the point. The compassion I felt for him arrived by accident, at the last possible moment, after the damage was done — and it still turned out to be the truest thing in the room. What I keep wondering is who I would have been if it had been there when he walked in.

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If this is the sort of thing you like thinking about, compassion is one of fifty states of consciousness I mapped in All 50 States: A Passport to Your Mind — a guided journey through the full terrain of the inner life, from ordinary waking awareness to grief, flow, awe, mystical union, and the harder territories most of us visit without a map. Each state comes with its own orientation, its own wisdom from across the traditions, and its own practice. All fifty lessons are available as a single download.

Coming this fall: I'll be leading a small founding cohort through the first segment of the map — five weekly lessons and a live session together, beginning Sunday, Oct 18.