A good story gives shape to the human experience and touches us in our innermost places. It picks us up right where we are and leaves us somewhere else — changed, transformed, more awake and alive and aware.
When someone has compassion on us, we find ourselves really seen, heard, attended to. If someone's attention is genuinely compassionate, it does not stop at attentiveness: he or she is willing to speak, act, or even suffer with us and for us. It is in such passivity, as we receive their compassion, that the most powerful dynamics of our own feeling and activity are shaped. Amazed gratitude for such compassion can last a lifetime.
