Continued from yesterday: I guess I'd like my son to understand, as he matures and enters adulthood, both the Buddhist and the Polish/Czech forms of compassion, as well as the European/American form. How to raise a child like that? By offering examples of it in my own actions, I suppose.
How do compassion and lightness fit together?
I'm not sure I agree with Milan Kundera (at least the novelist as he presents himself in The Unbearable Lightness of Being) that lightness is an existential condition; that life in its impermanence is light because Nietzsche's eternal return is heavy. I've presented lightness in earlier posts as a choice one makes, not something imposed on us. I still believe that. Although Kundera's point is an interesting one, it's a very abstract notion. (Since the idea of "eternal return" is abstract to us, how can the idea of life-as-lightness be anything but abstract?)
This is not to say that life itself, and thinking about how to live one's life, which is the underlying purpose of studying philosophy, involves one in abstractions. It involves one, more often than not, in the all-too-concrete.
Living one's life, then, should involve lightness--to counteract the heaviness that comes with thinking about how to live. And perhaps one can only reach this lightness after understanding, on some deep level, the need for compassion--as both feeling-with and being-with others.
That's perhaps what I wanted to say, ultimately, about raising a child: what could be more important than teaching a child about compassion?
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