Healing Space | Kashmir, compassion, conciliation

Note to readers: Healing Space is a weekly series that helps you dive into your mental health and take charge of your wellbeing through practical DIY self-care methods.

In the Book of Joy, co-authored by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, these two great men speak about the difficult periods their respective countries have faced: the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese, and the apartheid regime of South Africa. Speaking in this context, Archbishop Tutu says, “When Nelson Mandela went to jail he was young and, you could almost say, bloodthirsty. He was head of the armed wing of the African National Congress, his party. He spent twenty-seven years in jail, and many would say, ‘Twenty-seven years, oh, what a waste’. And I think people are surprised when I say no, the twenty-seven years were necessary. They were necessary to remove the dross. The suffering in prison helped him to become more magnanimous, willing to listen to the other side. To discover that the people he regarded as his enemy, they too were human beings who had fears and expectations. And they had been molded by their society. And so without the twenty-seven years I don’t think we would have seen the Nelson Mandela with the compassion, the magnanimity, the capacity to put himself in the shoes of the other.”

It takes a while to sink in. Why must we lose our anger to arrive at justice? Because anger inflames anger. To douse flames you need to perform the opposite action i.e. quench it, deprive the flames of oxygen. This is an act of compassion and a move towards reconciliation. Further on, the book notes how the Dalai Lama, whatever he may be known for, is not known for giving fiery speeches against China. Oh well, these are great and rare men, easy for them to say, we think. But in Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman amazingly finds instances of ordinary people acting with compassion, kindness, a sense of humanity even among the Nazis acting for their government during the Holocaust. “It's when crisis hits - when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise - that we humans become our best selves,” he notes. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari reminds us that the century we live in is the most peace-loving in the world yet: “Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite – politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable."

As we take in various forms of media, and consume the news - a daily litany of riots, oppressing minorities and women, clear biases and prejudices, mass manipulations, chest-thumping war cries and declarations of vengeance, retellings of history that display the worst of humanity - it is easy to forget that there are other ways in which to approach conflict. This is because the role of news is to focus on what is specifically going wrong and to call it out. Therefore the more we consume news, or any media with a spotlight on what has gone wrong, the more we condition our minds to seek what is wrong in the world. When we condition ourselves sufficiently, what we find validates our world view. We are in time convinced that the world is a terrible place and that justice looks increasingly like vengeance.