Just imagine: Helen Buckroyd’s Thought for the week

‘Without imagination, it would be easy to be angry.’

Early in the new year, many of us reflect on how we might change for the better. Often, coupled with a desire for physical change, comes a thirst for a spiritual or mental change, and the January media offers many tips for those in the pursuit of happiness.

So I was delighted to find out that being compassionate was one of the routes to happiness suggested by BBC Radio 4’s Just One Thing on New Year’s Day. I would thoroughly recommend all the tips, but tip two – ‘Use social friction as free therapy’ – might resonate with Friends. This is a phrase coined by Rangan Chatterjee, the well-known physician who was the subject of the programme. It means that whenever you encounter an irritating or annoying social situation, you should try to reframe your view of the actions of others with compassion. This requires imagination.

Consider for a moment someone at the supermarket paying with lots of loose change. The money falls from their hands and it takes the checkout assistant a few minutes to count it. Ordinarily, your impatience might prevail, coupled with a negative internal dialogue. So let’s use our imagination. What if this person’s partner is lying ill in intensive care? Any ready cash has been spent on car parking fees for the daily visits to the hospital. But behind the bread bin there is a hidden jar of change. It covers the cost of a small but deliciously-sweet Swiss roll, which might last several days as an afternoon treat. It offers a moment of peace, sitting in a lonely living room with only a cat for company. Looked at this way, wouldn’t your resentment slowly fade away? Compassion carries you towards your own contentment!

Next, picture the driver of a fast car cutting you up on your way to work. It could be a surgeon rushing to work at the local children’s cancer ward, late for a life-saving operation. As they left home their youngest child was shouting for help to find that special school water bottle. Feeling a failure as a parent, torn between work and family life, the surgeon rushes out of the front door.

Without imagination, it would be easy to be angry with the driver. But ‘Hate’, to paraphrase Graham Greene, is ‘just a failure of imagination’. It results in harboured wrath and resentment, destructive for both the subject and object of that hate. As the powerful Chinese proverb has it, ‘Those who seek revenge must dig two graves’.

Conversely, it is not always easy, in those moments of impatience, to put oneself in someone else’s shoes. But the ripple effect of that leap of imagination is as powerful as a stranger’s smile on a summer’s day. Compassion can lead to contentment – it is scientifically proven!

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