I feel terrible, I know I re-opened this blog on a positive note, but what happenned to me today has widned my eyes to how truly selfish I can be.
A woman on the train today collapsed from what looked like epilepsy, it could have been cataplexy but I doubt she was experiencing a strong enough emotion to have experienced it at the time. Anyway, her muscles froze (more technically, her muscle tone dropped) and her eyes were wide open, I don't think I'll ever forget her eyes, wide as though in shock and unmoving as though dead...
It was really quite horrific.
The gentleman around her tried to help her and then she fell to the floor, they then tried carrying her off the train... This is where my selfishness came in. I was directly behind the group of men and sick woman and the train had come to a stop at my destination and as you can imagine they were rather slow... so slow that I was woried the train doors would close before I could get off. So vast was my anxiety for myself that I deliberately brushed past the group.
When my feet were on unmoving ground I was thoroughly mortified in shame... did I have no human compassion? No instinct to help those in immediate danger? No recognition of an emergency? I was so calm throughout the whole thing that it unnerved me. In fact, I was shaking after the whole thing had happenned because I was so shocked at myself. I didn't offer to help and didn't hang around to see if she was okay like the hero men who did. I just carried on walking to the next platform. I did go to a staff member and tell him the situation. But I was still very upset at myself.
This got me thinking all the way home of how I should be more compassionate in the future should another situation arise. But... how can you learn compassion? Is it even a taught material? What makes a person compassionate and caring? Is it because their parents taught them how, or was it something that was genetically installed? Or something else entirely?
In the end.. I feel rather cold hearted, the good bit I suppose is that I don't like being cold hearted at all.
The views and happennings of a Manga-obsessed Neuroscience nerd with a strange interest in the medical genre.
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