Contemporary times lack empathy. At no other point in my life have I felt a more poignant scarcity of that most important human quality. The inability to empathize, to feel what another feels, to see a different side of things, to take an opposing point of view, has always spawned much of the world’s problems. Our current discourse feels courser, our values more polar, and our criticisms more pointed and cruel.

Tapping at my unconscious for months, the realization overwhelmed me on an unparticular Sunday night in November. It has impressed upon me ever since. I finally commit it to words as words failed before.

…

Our music video shoot had wrapped a few hours before. Filled with accomplishment but drained from the two day shoot, my co-producer Quinn and I strolled through a lonely parking garage to my car.

I pulled up to the sole ticket attendant, a middle aged man with sparse hair and thin glasses, and handed him my ticket with a ten. Distracted, the man fumbled about with the change in his drawer.

“How many people bang into this pole here,” I said with a smile, motioning to the pole lined with the worn paint of clumsy customers.

He smiled meekly while struggling with the little metal springs clipping the money. We waited.

“I’m sorry… it’s that I got a call from my friend today,” the man said. His voice and frame trembling as he placed the change in my hand.

“Oh?”

“My friend… I mean I just talked to Russ the other day. My friend… he told me today that Russ went and shot himself in the heart.”

The air left my lungs as if someone had punched me in the chest. Dumbstruck, I too trembled as I tried to form some sort of retort. The silence hung in the air. I looked to Quinn to affirm that she had heard what I was unable to comprehend. Words failed.

A long moment passed in the space between us.

I reached out the drivers side window and took hold of his hand. Our heads bowed.

“OK,” he said after a while, nodding and waving us off into the night with misty eyes.

Quinn and I rode wrapped in our own reminiscence. The thick silence only punctured by brief confirmations that we had indeed experienced the same thing moments before.

I dropped her off. I drifted down the 405 in a dream. And then I wept.

I wept for a stranger - a perfect stranger, working the graveyard shift in a Los Angeles parking garage, who had just lost a friend.

…

By no means is empathy easy. It is delicate, fleeting, and vulnerable to the slightest interruption. Yet, despite empathy’s transient nature, the simplest ‘I feel what you feel’, spoken or unspoken, can make all the difference.