“THESE DISPLAYS OF CARING MAY BRING US CLOSER.”
Outside our local supermarket, there’s a young woman who begs. Well, that’s not entirely true. She may be young, perhaps thirty or so, or she could even be rounding sixty; it’s hard to tell, the streets haven’t been kind (when are they ever?).
And she isn’t really begging, either. She squats, head bowed, a dirty cap of coins out in front. She is too worn out to ask for anything.
Just around the corner from my house there used to be a low-rent hotel. A squalid place but affordable for people fresh out of jail, or with drug addiction, or mental illness; prostitutes and petty criminals; sometimes all rolled into one. The paint was peeling, syringes stayed stuck in the nature strip after having been thrown out of broken windows, and the occasional shrieks from behind the double-brick walls did nothing to lessen my sense of dread whenever I hurried past.
Through my work, I came into the orbit of people who cared for some of the tenants. Social workers, nurses, doctors and others, who in addition to their daylight work hours also volunteered on weekends, nights and holidays. They didn’t boast about it. In fact, when I discovered that one of my colleagues was working at a soup kitchen, she asked me to keep it quiet because grandstanding on good deeds wasn’t her style.
Later, I mingled in circles where philanthropy was a thing. And even though there was distance between giver and receiver, the depth of feeling of the givers was tangible; they were touched by individual stories.
Many of them preferred their donations be anonymous, and the recipients would never know their benefactors. Thus, I came to appreciate that compassion can operate at a distance, limited neither by proximity nor identification.
At the time of writing, we are in the grip of an extraordinary crisis. Seemingly no-one is safe from an invisible enemy that ruthlessly picks off the elderly and unwell. It moves with blinding speed, unhindered by borders, uninhibited by medicines. Everyone is worried.
Aussies and Kiwis are renowned for having big hearts, but after the bushfires you’d think our compassion would be exhausted. Far from it. It’s not just neighbours, friends and strangers who have pulled together;
You don’t need to wait for the official Random Acts Of Kindness Day (on February 17 each year) to perform such acts. Here’s some you can perform right now: * Phone a friend or a lonely relative
* Give to a charity * Ask after a neighbour’s wellbeing
* Pay extra attention to your partner
* Give your pet a treat or a nice long walk * Pay someone a compliment
* Leave a large tip * Take the time to listen to someone * Do someone else’s chores
* Reconnect with old friends. businesses, too, are showing heart. Supermarkets have carved out special times exclusively for the vulnerable. Banks have stepped up to the fight for the economy. Countless other companies are thinking about people before profits. Formerly bickering sides of politics have put their differences aside.
And it’s not just here. In France, a distillery is donating thousands of litres of alcohol to go into sanitisers, and perfume factories there will manufacture it for free. In China, a businessman has offered a half million virus-testing kits to the United States. In Romania, a cosmetic business is gifting more than a million tons of personal hygiene products. The list goes on and on and on. Times are unbelievably tough, but just when you think corporations are solely about revenues, we see that many are led by people with heart.
We can watch choruses and orchestras forming across the balconies of self-isolated Italians. And then there are the creative videos about social distancing, handwashing and the like by musicians, dancers, entertainers, policemen, comedians ... and plain, old, non-celebrities from around the world. These displays of compassion demonstrate that, paradoxically, physical distancing may actually be bringing us closer together.
But there is also another aspect to compassion. A more complicated one: how we respond to people who make us feel uncomfortable.
A shopper piling mountains of toilet paper into her car; an elderly man, cane in one hand, pulling armloads of cans into his trolley with the other. Or the parents we hear of who are stockpiling flour and rice.
It goes against the tribe, the community, the sense that we are all in this together.
We can’t help but feel a visceral reaction when we witness such behaviour. They’re scared, but who isn’t? So we ridicule or shame or make jokes about them. We cast them as bad, and that makes us feel better.
I was lamenting about this to my wife after a day of unrelenting media coverage. About the woman I saw speed away with her toilet paper booty. About the old man and his cans. But that’s when she said something that made me think. Made me sit up in bed and shake my head in its utter obviousness.
And it made me realise why, after 20 years, I am still in love.
She said that compassion for strangers is more than just about charity. It’s more than just philanthropy. It’s about working at understanding, putting yourself in their shoes. At appreciating that we can only guess at the possible miseries that may still resonate for others. That compassion, real compassion, means not judging, or at the very least forestalling judgement before considering the circumstances.
Maybe the toilet paper lady had a brood of kids and no-one to help? Maybe the man with the cane had been through the war, and his memories of famine were still fresh after seventy-odd years? Sometimes compassion feels uncomfortable.
The senseless behaviour needs to end. But how do we make that happen? It may be that selfishness is the driver, but when we say that, the discussion stops there. Understanding that normally selfless individuals acting selfishly are doing so for a reason helps us better understand the causes. Compassion is a kinder teacher than anger – I need only to think back to my own experiences to see that – especially when people are scared.
A man comes out of the supermarket, piles of pasta and towers of tins in his trolley. He spots the homeless lady, she says something, and he leans down to her. He listens closely, and after a moment reaches into his cart. When he finds what he’s after, he withdraws it: a mango. He hands over the fruit and her face explodes in a giant smile; so does his. He was listening to his better angels.
This morning, my wife asked me and our kids to imagine that we are one year down the track. What are the things we are most proud of? How did 2020 shape us? Will we be able to look each other in the eye? There and then, I resolved to begin each day to try and listen to my better angels. I’ll let you know how it goes.
DR ROB SELZER
mindfood.com/virtues-kindness
and lifting with a round back is dangerous and increases a person’s risk of back injury. Our study reviewed all the available research on back pain and lifting and found there was no evidence that lifting with a more round or flexed back was associated with (or a risk factor for) back pain,” says O’Sullivan, a specialist musculoskeletal physiotherapist. He explains that this advice comes mainly from “studies of cadavers placed in a vice and repetitively flexed”.
However, “recent studies show that bending with a round back doesn’t place greater load on the discs [in the back] and is more efficient when lifting loads off the ground. Importantly most of the research to date is poor and no-one has looked at lifting over 12 kilograms, so we are doing more research on this at Curtin University now,” he says.
Occupational health physiotherapist Zac Lowth says we should be exploring better ways to lift. “We still see workplaces where people are lifting up to 80 kilos in a single lift by themselves,” says the National Operations Manager at Employ Health.
“I wouldn’t walk into a workplace where people are lifting more than 12 kilos and say, ‘You guys can go for it. Don’t worry about using your legs.’ If you look at Olympic weightlifters, they’re generating the majority of force through their legs when lifting very heavy loads. This approach seems most appropriate with regard to force generation and efficiency in the workplace.”
Lowth adds that numerous factors influence how people experience pain – many unrelated to a task or injury.
He explains that pain usually (though not always) starts with what’s called ‘nociception’ – where a danger sensation in your periphery, such as touching a hot plate or inflammatory chemicals triggered by a torn muscle, activates a reaction in your nervous system. This reaction is transmitted to the spinal cord and into the brain, which interprets the signal as pain.
However, psychological factors can ‘dial up or dial down’ your pain experience, he explains. One of these is hypervigilance, or the tendency to focus excessively on pain. This is frequently associated with fearavoidance – in which people avoid movements or activities they fear could lead to pain. This can result in disuse, which in turn lowers the threshold at which the person will experience pain. For example, imagine you injured your back bending to pick up a box. It gets better, but your mind associates bending with injury. You avoid bending, instead reminding yourself to always keep your back straight. This leads to stiffness and more back pain.
Furthermore, worry about moving or hurting your back can lead to changes in the brain’s wiring. Lowth explains that your brain contains ‘maps’ representing the body – one each for the sensory (feeling) system and motor (movement) system. Normally, body areas that are very sensitive (like the tongue) or coordinate fine movements (like the fingers) are represented by larger areas on the map – which scientists call the homunculus.
“Your back naturally doesn’t take up too much of the space in the homunculus,” he says. “However, if a particular body area has more input than others over time, the amount of space that it represents will increase. Therefore, when you have even minor input to that area, it may cause a larger pain sensation to be felt.” This means usually normal movements or sensations, such as bending forward or light touch, can be interpreted as dangerous, and therefore painful.
Another factor that can amplify the pain experience is an unhelpful thinking style called ‘pain catastrophising’. In this scenario, the person experiencing (or fearing they might experience) pain believes it will result in the worst possible outcome. For example, someone who has a mild back injury will assume they’ll have severe, unrelenting pain their whole life.
For Lexi, beliefs have been vital to recovery. “I’ve had a lot of doctors and other people tell me I won’t [get back to full strength] but I don’t like that limiting belief,” she says. Seeing a somatic experience counsellor (one focussed on relieving the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental and physical traumarelated health problems by focusing on the client’s perceived body sensations) has helped her deal with the trauma of injury, pain and surgery, she says.
Furthermore, Professor David Baxter, from the University of Otago’s Division of Health Sciences, says strong evidence shows taking time off work increases the disability associated with back problems.