Today is September 29 and the Navigate the chaos question to consider is “How often do you demonstrate empathy to connect with others?”
People who navigate the chaos understand that their pain is not unique and that everyone suffers.
The key is to figure out a way through the suffering to the other side in order to translate a dream into reality. American writer James Baldwin wrote “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
Award winning director Martin Scorsese made the classic film Raging Bull based on his empathy towards the subject, boxer Jake LaMotta. It stars Robert De Niro as LaMotta, an Italian American middleweight boxer whose self-destructive and obsessive rage, sexual jealousy, and animalistic appetite destroyed his relationship with his wife and family.
Scorsese was disinterested in the project when DeNiro brought the story to the director’s attention but changed his mind after a serious illness helped him empathize with LaMotta’s character.
While attending the 1978 Telluride Film Festival in the Colorado Rockies, Scorsese collapsed. Immediately on his return to New York he collapsed again and was taken to a hospital, bleeding from every orifice. His condition was life-threatening and doctors told him that he had no platelets in his blood, the result of an interaction between his asthma medicines and other prescription drugs. They told him that he was in imminent danger of a brain hemorrhage. They pumped him full of cortisone and ordered total bed rest. In time, he began to recover, at which point De Niro visited him in the hospital.
Like La Motta, Scorsese had touched bottom, and the actor judged his friend was ready to hear yet another pitch for Raging Bull. He was right. “I couldn’t understand Bob’s obsession with it, until, finally, I went through that rough period of my own,” Scorsese recalls. Scorsese demonstrated empathy towards LaMotta and wound up making one of film’s greatest productions.
How often do you demonstrate empathy?