Walk in the Other Person’s Shoes

I recently finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Such a good story! My favorite part reading it this time came from a conversation Scout had with her Father. Atticus was trying to explain empathy to his young daughter after a rough first day of school. He said, “First of all, if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from their point of view–until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

I’ve been able to apply this so many times over the last couple of weeks.

The kids and I are reading a book called Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt. It has some tough themes that have allowed us take a walk in another person’s shoes and help us not judge.

The main character belongs to a family with a lot of abuse. There is a cycle that needs to be broken and we have hopes that it will be broken by the end of the story. The author does a good job of making you hate the father and feel sorry for the mother. But throughout the story we’ve had opportunities to talk about what each character might be feeling and why they could maybe be acting the way they are.

During one scene the oldest brother came home from the war in Vietnam. His legs had been amputated and his face badly burned. The bandages and his actions make you believe that he was blind. The father doesn’t help with loading him or the wheelchair into the truck and races into the house without helping as soon as they get home. Our immediate thought was that the dad was a jerk, but after some reflection we wondered if he just didn’t know how to cope with this tragedy. The only way he knows how to cope is to run away and drink. Maybe he wasn’t being a jerk. Maybe he just didn’t know how to handle his emotions.

We’ve also been able to apply the advice to the current situation of race violence and rioting. We’ve asked how others might feel and tried to understand why they might be acting the way they are acting.

Being able to walk in another person’s shoes is a good skill. It allows you to see things from their perspective and understand their actions better. How do you do this?
–make it a habit to look for multiple perspectives
–try not to judge
–ask questions instead of assuming
–watch this video
–replace anger with compassion
–discover similarities, not the differences

What would you add to the list?