Compassion according to Sese

For the first time in my life I attended one of the world’s biggest events and saw one of the world’s most respected people, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Listening to his words and answering the questions that were thrown at him by scientists, I felt it was wonderful how they had a conversation about how compassion begins and at what stage we feel empathy and compassion.

I learned that compassion is within us from birth and as we grow up certain circumstances and challenges changes our lives and compassion starts disappearing. It takes a long time to realize that we’ve always had compassion.

I come from a small township in Cape Town called Wallacedene which is South Africa and a lot of people have lost their sense of compassion because of the problems that we are facing like crime poverty and lack of jobs. So every body does not care about anybody else but himself. Today I realized that there’s still a chance for them to bring the feeling of compassion back if they can reach out and get to see the other parts of the world, experience how life is on the other parts of the world.
For me compassion is something that I have always had for any person that I come across with. But there were times when I could show it to other people and there were times when I couldn’t see compassion in action. Sometimes I felt like having compassion only towards my friends and family because I thought that they were the only important things to me. But through understanding compassion I felt very bad of the way I treated other people before and made it up to them.

When I look at the history of my country and how people were treated during the apartheid laws I don’t have that grudge in me. I feel that we have to go back to that history and find a way to forgive and forget, to show love and compassion and unite together as one.

I understand that it is not easy to just forgive and forget but if we would all have the same understanding about compassion and what role it plays in our lives we would have the feeling of forgiveness within us.