Without sensory information, we can feel and understand things. I can now experience the scent of the incense at my grandmother’s funeral, the sound of my father’s voice, the feeling of my nine-year-old son's newborn hair, and the taste of split pea soup on the deck of a ship in Alaska without any stimuli from my senses.
Our imagination is also one of the most potent tools of empathy. We can sense how someone feels about something without actually experiencing it ourselves. For example, I have never won a championship on a sports team. Still, I can imagine how great it would feel to experience these emotions by watching sports documentaries and films. So when I watch a team win a championship, I can get emotionally involved because my imagination informs my empathy.
When you take that step of imagination and actually know firsthand experience, empathy comes quickly and more profoundly. Because all of my grandparents have passed away, when someone I know loses a grandparent, I have real experience to draw from to empathize with them. I don’t need t to imagine how it feels. Experience is a powerful and essential part of empathy and allows us to make deeper connections with others, but it can bring us to dark places when the unimaginable happens.
The shooting in Uvalde hit me on two levels. The teachers and students who died were in a 4th-grade classroom. I teach fourth grade. I know what those students are like, and I know what it means to teach that age. And what hit me Wednesday night is the fact that my oldest son, Ollie, is the same age as some of these students who died. I’m looking at parents describing the worst times of their lives, and we are connected. This tragedy happened to someone who has my job in a school with students the same age as the students I teach and also happened to parents who have children the same age as me.
I didn’t have to imagine much to see myself in this situation, and it doesn’t take a lot for me to imagine this happening in my school and to my child.
As a teacher, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to have a shooter come into my school Wednesday morning on the way to work. I almost had to pull over. It was overwhelming, and as tears came to me, I didn’t fight them and let the emotions come over me like a wave. It was a hard experience, but it felt necessary and important.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t let myself imagine what it would be like to lose my son to a school shooting. It may hit me at a moment when I don’t expect it, or it might trigger the upcoming funerals of the children who died in Uvalde last week. When it comes, it will be rough, but it will be vital for me to feel for myself and to further empathize with others.
Maybe by strengthening empathy muscles through imagination, we can imagine something better for our children.
Let us be motivated by sorrow and pain to bring light to our world.
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