My sons’ college “football emotional support” bunny has come to our house to stay for a bit. Though I presume most mascots for college football teams are lizards, snakes, bulldogs and the like, rural Ohio environs offered up a ten-dollar black and white dairy cow print rabbit from Tractor Supply as a COVID distraction. I don’t know why I get such enjoyment out of him and his wily therapeutic ways (he is very soft!), but his purpose is clear – he is a salve for the complicated life of 20-something college males – and I am beginning to learn some lessons about what he provides in their lives that we all may need.
Our community has experienced so much in the last two years, and we have all been affected differently. Some new families among us have the benefit of freshness but the absence of context. Some families who have been with us for generations wonder how COVID protocols and public attacks on the school are changing the place they love. Many others are ready to have the school continue to be the healthy, strong place that it is. With so many views and experiences of the past few years, the building of a cohesive community in our city, our neighborhoods and, most importantly, for our students – this school – becomes a puzzling enterprise.
All of us, as people who care about children and education, hope for similar outcomes in their intellectual growth and sense of well-being, but the nature of our public discourse all around us right now has a menacing effect on how we identify our similarities among our differences, even in a relatively small place like Columbus Academy.
By now most of us are aware of the research around human tribalism and the brain’s wiring to trust only those things that are familiar, visible and accountable. An excellent adaptation for early man, empathy was readily available for most other human beings with whom our brains came in contact through the landscape for thousands of years.
In The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, Jamil Zaki, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, explains that modern life is much more global, urban, solitary (people are 10 times more likely to live alone) and anonymous (online socially and professionally); and the tribalism of today – i.e., sports fandom, ethnic conflict and even politics – doesn’t just make our empathy towards others vanish, it is actually reversed. The result, he states, is the rise in a form of schandenfreude: enjoyment in producing suffering in people we feel are different from ourselves.
Obvious in social media is the sea of painful reminders of how we as a whole society seem to have become more cruel, angry and less connected when the medium promised only a decade ago to elicit a great global community of shared understanding (remember the invention of likes?). Luckily, Zaki states, empathy – the ancient “social glue” our brains use to feel part of a larger whole – is something we can choose to grow ourselves if we see it more as science is revealing it to be: a muscle that needs to be exercised and skill that develops with practice. He even created an “empathy gym” to illustrate just such work.
Recently, our students have led the way in creating empathic practice moments on campus by simulating PT at 6:30 a.m. for the Upper School on Veterans Day, by spreading kindness in PreK by walking throughout the campus delivering small “kind dots” and participating in selfless activities during Eighth Grade Service Day. Parents and guardians, meanwhile, are working hard to continue to plan activities at the grade, division and schoolwide levels this spring to promote a greater sense of connection.
And, of course, the bunny – in his own environment – is doing his best at kindling the warmth, devoted care and gentleness he requires from a team of boys on their college campus learning how to live life away from home and on their own.
It may be that, in the words of one of my favorite poems, “we have come to our real work…” and it is the deep empathic work each member of a community commits to in an effort to see each other as part of a whole.
I hope you join me in embracing the building of our “empathy muscles” starting with our upcoming Thanksgiving break with family and continuing into the New Year with our larger community. We have the opportunity to connect even more deeply than before.
"Real Work" by Wendall Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Warmly,
