Over this past year, I’ve experienced life as a solo traveler across North and South America. Every day I was introduced to something new - new places, new people, new cultures, and new experiences. The world around me in flux, and promises of what lay ahead nebulous at best. Equal parts enthralling and intimidating, my wanderlust year has been an experience for my lifetime and a crucible through which I’ve grown my empathetic sense.
A Crucible Forging Empathy
At the start of my travels, I was feeling socially adrift. Although I consider myself extroverted, leaving a social environment I cultivated over years as a young professional was far from easy. I quickly yearned for the comfort provided through close friendships - a part of me felt amiss.
As it turns out, this feeling of identity loss was far from hyperbolic. According to psychological studies, an individual’s self-image, their ego, is strongly tied to other people. We ultimately incorporate close relationships into the formation of our own self-image. As James Coan, a UVA psychology professor puts it, “When we develop friendships, people we can trust and rely on who in essence become [ourselves], then our resources are expanded, we gain. Your goal becomes my goal. It’s a part of our survivability” [Human Brains…]. This phenomenon stems from humanities social nature and is an innate and highly powerful experience of empathy.
By leaving an environment rich with close relationships, I created an empathic void in my life when I began my travels. I starved myself the close friendships that serve as innate outlets for experiencing and expressing empathy. Driven to foster new empathetic outlets, I quickly began to foster close friendships throughout my travels. In concert with this innate drive, and as the result of two key factors along my travels…
An Abundance of Empathetic Opportunities
A Diversity of Empathetic Experiences
…my empathetic sense deepened greatly. The quantity and diversity of empathetic experiences during my travels gifted me with a wealth of experiences to serve as my backbone for a deepened empathetic sense.
“In a profound way, I’ve placed myself in the shoes of others time and time again during my year of travel”
An Abundance of Empathetic Opportunity
Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, suggests that people have biological limits to the number of relationships they can maintain. This capacity for relationships is subdivided along a hierarchy that proposes we only have a capacity to maintain five close relationships. This means five people with whom we intrinsically confide and open ourself to in a deeply emotional way.
My year traveling provided a steady matriculation of these five close relationships. My human nature to experience empathy through close relationships was leverage as a result. I was continually pushed to build close relationships from new acquaintances amidst the transient world of my travels - and as the old adage goes, “practice makes perfect”.
Further facilitating my new outlets for empathy, were the characteristics of the places I resided along my travels. As an outdoor enthusiast, these places were amidst the wilderness and hosted small cohorts of fellow travelers. We were removed from strains an urban environment places upon our capacity for empathy. These environments of dense population force us into interactions with more people than our biological capacity to develop meaningful connections to. As a result, we often shield ourselves from emotional experiences outside our own social circle. According to Robin Dunbar, this social circle is limited to 150 people - a minuscule amount in comparison to the number of people who surround us in urban environments.
To reconcile this dissonance between an urban environment and our biology, we often ward off opportunities for new relationships. Thus, we ward off opportunities for new empathetic experiences to deepen our overall empathetic sense. This behavior serves as a defense mechanism to ensure stability with our social circle; however, it was a limitation that remained absent along my travels.
“I found a sanctuary for empathetic growth amidst the wilderness of North and South America.”
A Diversity of Empathetic Experiences
The diversity of people for whom I experienced empathy with along my travels served to greatly deepen my empathetic sense. I met numerous people with backgrounds that spanned a variety of circumstances: culturally, experientially, professionally, and generationally. With such extensive differences between us, I began an understanding of others through a kernel of commonality we shared - a passion for the outdoors and nature.
From this common frame of reference, I was able to deeply explore the lives of others I met - to walk a mile in their shoes. Through this exploration of others, as they became close friends of mine, I came to include their diverse background into my own self-image. As a result, my empathetic reach towards others was greatly expanded. I gained connections to experiential knowledge beyond my own life that serves as foundational ingredients for my empathetic sense.
To empathize is to connect with something inside yourself that knows the feelings experienced by others. Sympathy and empathy are often confused with each other; however, the differences hinges on experiential knowledge. Whereas sympathy is understanding someone else's experience from a cognitive level, empathy is feeling someone else’s experience on an emotional level. Feeling is experiential, and without a connection to an an analogous experience, you cannot feel the experience shared to you from others and thus you cannot truly empathize with them.
“The diversity of experiences shared to me, through a wealth of close relationships I developed along my travels, has cultivated extensive avenues from which I can build bridges of empathy to others.”
Eyes and Heart Open to a World Beyond Myself
Although my time as a traveler across North and South America is coming to a close, I will carry forward in my life a deepened understanding towards my experiences and expressions of empathy. The value I’ve received through relationships along my journey will not wither away. Instead, I forge onward with empathetic clarity and awareness.
