Passion and Compassion
We were in Taupo when the lockdown was announced. It was our substitute for Noosa (sigh), again (sigh). We enjoy Taupo, good food, good shopping, plenty to do, including Craters MTB park which I really enjoy. I had my bike on the rack when we went into town to get some supplies. Yes, it is an e-bike and FYI it’s great fun for getting up the hills but it’s bloody heavy when you come off.
My wife’s mobility is limited due to a medical accident nearly 5 years ago, and we have a disabled parking card which we had hanging from the rear vision mirror when we parked in a disabled space.
When we returned to the car we found a scrap of paper under the windscreen. Someone had written “this park is for disabled you wanka”. I was a bit puzzled for a moment, and not just by the spelling. Then I realised they had leapt to a conclusion based on the bike which was perhaps not unreasonable if you either ignored the card or also leapt to the conclusion that it was being abused.
I had just read a blog by the wonderful Morgan Housel where he talked about how it is easier to recognise other people’s mistakes than our own. One of the reasons for that it that “all behaviour makes sense with enough information”. If the note writer had known that the bike was mine and that my wife does indeed have a disability, they might not have jumped to their conclusion.
But let’s say that they decided I was still a wanka anyway. That could happen because either (a) they were stupid or (b) they’ve experienced something in the past that led them to that conclusion.
The point is I don’t have enough information to know. And if I’d experienced what they’d experienced, I might share their commendable passion for defending access for the disabled.
We don’t see our mistakes as mistakes because we have a lot of information in our heads which justifies why we acted the way we did.
The next time you hear about people like the couple who broke lockdown to go to Wanaka for a holiday, remember that somewhere they had a story that justified it. It was still wrong, but they could plausibly answer the question “what were they thinking” (plausible to them anyway).
The next time someone does something stupid at work, pause for a second before you judge them and wonder what information they used to make that decision. You might still regard it as a bad decision, but you might have a little more compassion for the person. Compassion is not a word we use much these days, but it’s the right one here, better even than empathy.
And heaven knows, in a world where so many people rush to share their judgements and so many other people follow them, we could do with a little more compassion. Even for those who misspell wanker.
