Most Friday nights I go with my fiance to a movie night put on by some of our friends. We watch a movie and go out to dinner somewhere afterward – Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, whatever sounds good that day. We call it Movie Night, and at the end of a long week, it’s nice for everyone to get together and decompress. At dinner we talk about a wide range of topics, moving from one to the other as a new story is told or a funny meme is remembered.
For a brief moment this last Friday, we talked about empathy.
Empathy: [noun] the feeling that you understand and share another person’s experiences and emotions; the ability to share someone else’s feelings
I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy because my fiance and I were recently in a car accident. It was a five car pile up on a freeway that was reduced to two lanes because of construction. After the accident happened, we blocked off one of those two lanes for a couple of hours – we undoubtedly caused some awful rush-hour traffic.
My emotional progression and certain details of the accident come back to me pretty clearly, just not the details that the police and insurance companies wanted from me. I don’t remember how fast I was going or if I saw anyone in my rear-view, but I do remember that the first emotion I had, after making sure my fiance was fine, was fear. I was scared the other drivers would be angry – I was afraid of being chastised, of being blamed, of being hated for having been involved.
I panicked. I, we, had been in an accident. Who knew what the damage was to my car. Outside my vehicle were unknown entities with independent and unpredictable reactions that I would have to come face-to-face with if I left my car. We were the first car in the pile-up, so I just stared at the stretch of empty freeway in front of me, thinking how rare it was to see car-less freeway during rush hour. Another car pulled in front of me and stopped, blocking my view of the emptiness. I was frozen because I didn’t know what to do next.
So I sat, I breathed, and I ran through a mental systems-check:
Legs – online
Torso – online
Arms – online
Neck – online
Head – online, but not processing input – error detected.
I started looking around for solutions. The problem-solving parts of my brain kicked in and shoved the panicked bits off to the side for sanity’s sake. The car was off and in park. The emergency break was on. My GPS was on the floor. The knickknacks in the cubbies of my dash were all over the floor and the front seats. My cellphone was working. The front of my car seemed fine from inside, all the doors looked OK and my mirrors were all still on.
As I looked in one of my side-view mirrors, I saw someone getting out of their car. It suddenly occurred to me that other people had been in this accident with us, and that some of them may not have come out of it with all systems online, like we had. A more human part of my brain turned back on. I still couldn’t bring myself to let go of the steering wheel and take my foot off the brake, so I asked my fiance to go check on him, and he did. I spent my alone time letting go of the wheel and taking my foot off the break. I took a deep breath and I left the car.
I went straight for my fiance where he stood talking to the guy who had been in the third of the five cars – smack-dab in the middle of everything. Something that looked like the floor of the trunk was smashed up against the driver’s seat, which was leaning back at a strange angle. The front of the car was completely crushed in and the dashboard was smoking. The guy had gotten out of his car and was walking around talking to people, but I asked him if he was OK. I’m not sure if I was asking for his sake or mine, and I don’t know if I was asking whether he was physically or mentally OK. Maybe I was asking everything and hoping for the best on all accounts. The guy looked at me with wide eyes and a blank expression that made it seem like he almost didn’t understand my question. He said he was fine. Just a little disoriented. I noticed his glasses on the driver’s seat and asked if he needed them. I noticed his hands were shaking wildly as he reached for his broken frames. Only then did I notice that his airbag had deployed and now lay draped across the front cup-holders and the passenger’s seat.
That was when I really looked at him. This man, who I’d never met before and I would never meet again, probably never even talk to again, was standing outside of his beyond-totaled car and couldn’t take his eyes off of the wreckage before him. I gave him the same mental systems-check I had given myself, and the tests came back exactly the same. We were in this together. I left my fiance talking to him, slowly bringing his human systems back online with simple chatter and a friendly presence. That was when my head re-engaged.
I proceeded to verify for myself that everyone who had been involved was OK, and everyone was. The cars, not so much, but the people were physically unharmed. What I gathered from talking to everyone was that we were all in the same mental place; we all understood and shared one another’s personal experiences, emotions, and feelings about what had just happened. We had all been in an accident, we were all in shock, and we were all scared.
And we were all checking in with each other to make sure the others were OK. I knew that when the time came to settle claims and assign blame that stories would change and guilt would be passed like a hot potato, but in that moment we were all just trying to get a grasp on the situation and we were leaning on each other to do that. It was like an extreme, forced empathy between strangers who may never have even been friends in real life, and while we hated each other just a little for having been involved in the accident, we were all overwhelmingly happy that everyone came out of it with everything functioning. The money, the heartache, the time that would be spent dealing with this loomed over us, but it loomed over all of us, and we all knew it. We spent our time waiting for the cops to show by expressing our own coping mechanisms at one another. I blurted out things that needed to happen, even though they were already happening. I must have said “we need to swap insurance information” at least five times, and each time someone calmly reminded me that we were already doing that. At one point I walked over to the lady who had pulled in front of me and we swapped stories about what had happened during the accident and compared notes about how we were feeling. She asked me to check her door and I told her why I thought she couldn’t open it. I took a picture of it on my phone to show her. We even laughed about something – I don’t know what, but it was freeing and we did it together. Eventually the cops came, business was taken care of, tow-trucks were called, and those of us who could drive our cars were on our way.
The degree of this empathy, it’s strength, wasn’t clear to me until I was speaking with my insurance agent a few days later. He assured me that he would pursue the party found guilty for the cost of my repairs.
Pursue: [verb] to follow or chase somebody/something, especially in order to catch them
When I heard him say he would “pursue the guilty party,” I wanted to tell him not to. We had been in that accident together, all of us, and none of us deserved to be “pursued.” Responsibility should be taken, matters of money and liability should be settled, vehicle repairs should be made and disagreements resolved, but no one should be run down and villainized. I wanted justice for the man who damaged my car, even though he had damaged my car. He was a person, and I knew that because I had felt the same things he had when we had stood on the freeway that day, eyes glued to the vehicular carnage. I honestly don’t even know the guys name, but I didn’t want him to suffer more than he had to. I was there in that mental space with him that day. I understand what he was going through. Twisted metal, blown-out windows, insurance card unaccessible in a jammed glove compartment – those things had been real problems that needed seeing to. “Pursuing the guilty party” was not a problem that even made it on my list of things that needed dealing with.
All of these partially digested experiences and emotions came bubbling back to the surface when we talked about empathy for those few minutes at Movie Night dinner. It was a short conversation, a passing series of unimportant remarks about the strength and effectiveness of empathy and the role it plays in many different social interactions. It felt good, though, to be able to talk about this thing I had experienced, even if we were only talking about it in the abstract. It was nice to remember how, in the aftermath of the accident, empathy had reminded us that we were all human and we were all in this thing together. And it was even nicer to realize that these people sitting around me – discussing movies, psychology, biology – were choosing to be empathetic toward me, and I was choosing to be empathetic toward them. The forced empathy I had so recently and vividly experienced threw into strong relief how amazing voluntary empathy is, how lucky we are to have it, and how little we appreciate it when we get it from others.
I looked around the table at the people I have chosen to empathize with; the same people who have chosen to empathize with me in return.
All I could do was smile as the conversation moved on to cats chasing bears up trees.
