compassion is a sympathetic awareness of another's distress joined to the desire to relieve it — feeling someone's suffering and being moved to act on it.
Compassion goes beyond just having pity for someone (sympathy) or even being able to feel someone else’s pain (📝empathy). Compassion is when we sense such a pain and are motivated to actively alleviate it — a distinction framed this way by 📝Mike Radparvar, co-founder of 📝Holstee. Pity looks down on suffering from outside it, sympathy feels for the sufferer, empathy feels with them; compassion is the one of the four that carries a motive. That motive is what makes it a virtue rather than only an emotion, and why the word is used of practices and institutions as well as of feelings.
The word entered English in the mid-fourteenth century from Old French compassion, from Late Latin compassio, built on com- ("with, together") and pati ("to suffer") — literally "suffering with." The Latin was coined as a church translation of the Greek sympatheia, which makes compassion and sympathy etymological twins that drifted apart in use. The same verb pati gives English 📝patience, passion, and patient. In some Middle English uses compassion still meant actually sharing another's affliction, not just feeling for it.
“Compassion is the radicalism of our time.” ~ The Dalai Lama XIV
“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” ~ Pema Chödrön
Compassion is one of the values I deliberately practice 📝Priming for. It is also the condition I put on change: as my 📝Under No Obligation shirt is meant to say, change communicated openly and with compassion will always be encouraged.