Classroom Presentation 13

So, good afternoon, everyone, today I’m doing a presentation on compassion.

So, first of all, I’m going to share with you an experience that I have had with someone that I’ve known for quite some time, and um… I’m going to share this experience because um… this experience evokes my compassion for another person. But before do our on… but, but before we jump into this topic, I would love to define what compassion really is. Compassion is a feeling of sadness you share with someone in their grief and um… through my presentation I’m going to tell you, as I said, a story about um… um… eh… co, a story of compassion and also why compassion is useful and valuable nowadays.

So, I still remember this eh… writing piece titled ‘The Bright one’ that I read and heard when I was attending a creative writing class. And, and so… it was written by, it was written by a student, a female student. She’s talking about her difficult childhood memories, for example, how she was abused severely as a child, how she was slapped in the face by her mother, how she was beaten up by her father, and so from very early on, she got no homes to, she got no homes to go. So um... so, during festivals where we are supposed to, where we were supposed to be spending time with our families and friends, such as the Chinese new years, what, what she would do instead, was to, was to sleep, was to sleep over at her friends’ houses and also having meals from differents families. So she has been homeless, because unfortunately, she was born a female, and her family wanted her to be a male, but it didn’t turn out well. Her f, her mother also, like, was very, her mother was also very cruel to her. So, for example, when she was ill, she caught her mom, and her mother just snapped about her saying that, like, why should I bother to care that you’re, you’re ill? And… So, she was raised and born in such a difficult background that as a normal being, for example, if I were her, I would be… I would turn into a very hateful, very anti-social person. And the reason why this writing was titled the brighter one it’s because one day, she stumbled upon a lamppost which shone much brighter than the rest, and she was confused, because she thought that dur, she thought that… She couldn’t think of the reason why there was such a very different, and much brighter lamppost standing there. So, she went down and tend to figure it out what’s going on, and then she realized that the glass of the lamp ha, has been broken, and so there’s nothing that stops the light from shining from within, from shining through, from coming through. So that’s when she realized that these experiences did not make her a bad person, but instead makes her a brighter, the ’Brighter One’.

I’m very touched by the… {coughing} Excuse me. I’m very touched by the story, because um… many people think that compassion has to be, has to be evoked in a very upsetting sit, upsetting situation. To me compassion is a feeling that is very spontaneous and that comes very naturally. Um… But, of course, I was really upset by listening to her story, but also I, but also on the other side, it is also the compassion part of it, that I am very touched by her resilience. To me, compassion is a source of human hope, because um… it is often through compassion that we empathize with another person’s suffering and it is also through this process we realized that um… we human beings are much more resilient than we think we are. So, I think that embracing the world with compassion can be a very uplifting, healing experience.

So, thank you. That’s the end of my presentation.