Lesson #6 on Becoming a Ya Ya Hiké: Finding Empathy

     In my children's fantasy adventure novel, Kiva & the Stone Nation, Kiva learns how to become a shape-shifting shaman from Scout, the girl-shaped stone tasked as her guide. As Kiva's lessons continue she is taught that the best way to shift is to connect with the object or person she wants to become.  But after she shifts successfully for the first time she is warned, “You just learned lesson number six the hard way,” said Scout. “When you use a real object as a guide in shifting, you connect to every cell of that object—its thoughts, its feeling, its senses … and, as you just found out, its memories.”

   What Scout is teaching Kiva is the same lesson found in one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. In chapter 3 of the novel Atticus Finch says to his daughter Scout, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."  

     What both the stone, Scout, and Atticus Finch are trying to convey to their pupils is the concept of empathy. We humans have a propensity to judge quickly. Numerous research articles have been written on how first impressions often become the basis for how well relationships fair. So if there is a bad first impression, even though the person may be a nice person having a bad day, we often forget how complex humans are and instead remember only that bad first impression. "Climbing into someone else's skin" gives us the opportunity to step back from the first impression and remember that we all have many stories inside of us. Our families, our past, our upbringing, good and catastrophic events we have experienced, all shape who we are. I'm also a believer that deep inside every person, even the one's we consider untrustworthy, there is a spark of the Divine. Climbing into someone else's skin allows us to find the Divine in all people. And as Kiva & the Stone Nation reminds us, even the creatures of the forest and the stones have stories to tell. 

     Take a moment today to think about a person, creature or object that may have given you a bad first impression. Then "climb into his (their) skin and walk around in it." I'd love to hear from you what you learned.

Happy Reading!