Beginning

This is a blog about compassion. More precisely, it’s a blog about my personal attempt to understand the nature of compassion and how to apply that understanding to my life.

 I’m a 43 year-old married father of three boys who works as a lawyer for an insurance company. I live on Long Island and commute by train to an anonymous office park in New Jersey where I spend the day evaluating lawsuits brought against power companies. A couple of times a month, I get on an airplane and fly to some random corner of the United States where I participate in mediations that usually result in a monetary settlement of the aforementioned lawsuits. In my spare time, such as it is, I run and practice Zen Buddhism.

During the course of my work I am regularly confronted with people who have sustained the most horrible, disfiguring injuries that you could possibly imagine. Many of these are burn injuries. These are people who are suffering terribly, whether through my client’s negligence, their own negligence, or just through the random happenstance of karma. When you deal with human suffering like this on a daily basis you naturally want to build up your defense mechanisms. The problem with building up defense mechanisms like gallows humor and cynicism is that these mental constructs get in the way of experiencing your life as it really is. Detaching from the pain and suffering of others intrinsically means that you become detached from your own. One of the basic truths of Buddhism is that we are all connected on a fundamental level. There is no difference between “you” and “me”.

I recognized that in order to more fully recognize and actualize this universal connection in my own life, I needed to step forward and embrace it. In order to do this I decided that I would resolve to practice one selfless act per day for a year to see whether at the end of the year I was any closer to understanding the nature of compassion and the interconnectedness of all beings than I was at the start of the year.

This blog is a record of my efforts. I kind of missed the first few days of the calendar year so I decided to start this project on my birthday, January 3, 2011. Stay tuned.