Tim Hortons: The Value Of Compassion

Imagine you wake up early, on a chilly Monday morning, and you are hungry, but no one made breakfast. Due to this, you decide to go out to your favourite breakfast place, Tim Hortons. You purchase your favourite meal, a cup of hot chocolate and a carrot muffin. Without thinking, you munch it down with pleasure. As you are exiting Tim Hortons, you notice there is a homeless woman with two children. The woman and her children seem cold and you can hear their stomach rumbling due to starvation. You stop walking and stare. What are you feeling? Compassion. Compassion is the ability to understand the emotional state of another person or oneself. It literally means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that …show more content…
You walk back into Tim Hortons and purchase three cups of hot chocolate and three carrot muffins. As you are handing the muffins and the cups of hot chocolate to the woman and her children, you see the woman smile, and the look of pleasure on her face, makes you smile. Suddenly, the guilty feeling you had is replaced with joy and satisfaction. Compassion isn’t just a negative feeling, it can be turned into a positive feeling as well. After providing the homeless lady and her children with food - a supposed human right - the homeless lady and you both feel a positive connection that made both of you smile. The guilty feeling you had has gone away, and now you feel more like a caring and helpful person to society. Obviously, you won’t be winning a Nobel peace prize for your act of kindness, but you feel positive about yourself. The woman and her children have something to eat to stop them from starvation and give them the nutrients they need to stay healthy. The woman is happy, and her children and her can now survive another day due to your act of …show more content…
If you just continued staring and didn’t provide the homeless woman and her children with a necessity, she and her children could have died due to starvation. That was a life or death situation, where not showing compassion or not taking any actions towards it, could have made a huge impact the woman and her