A hard watch…

I don’t enjoy watching people suffer. Even when they’ve spent years causing suffering themselves. There’s something uncomfortable about watching someone’s life fall apart and remembering all the lives they showed very little compassion for along the way.

Maybe that’s why karma has never felt particularly satisfying to me. From a distance it sounds like justice. Up close, it’s still another human being hurting.

Perhaps the hardest part is realising that compassion doesn’t require amnesia. I can feel sorry for what is happening to someone without forgetting what they did to others. I can hope they recover without rewriting their history.

Maybe it just remains an uncomfortable middle ground. You don’t have to celebrate someone’s downfall to recognise that eventually, the way we move through the world can catch up with us.