Get outside your life.

I know this is a tough one, since we all exist inside our own experiences and emotional relationships, not to mention the obligations we have to our spouses and kids and also the debts we think we owe to our ancestors and others. But try putting all that aside. Just for now.

Many experts who have interviewed those convicted of awful crimes say that one of the main things they notice about their interviewees is that they don't have any idea of the impact what they did had on not just the victim but the victim's loved ones. They lacked empathy, that truly human ability to put oneself in the place of another (Clinton's famous line: "I feel your pain.").

When we're most absorbed in our own problems -- be they financial or personal or whatever -- the last thing we want to do is to try to see others' problems as if they were our own. But it really is a unique human trait (so far as I know -- and what do I know?). One of the best ways to come to terms with our own unfortunate situation is to imagine a situation far worse.

Fiction writers do it all the time, creating evil characters who wreak great ruin on innocents. One of the factors differentiating "literature" from "genre fiction" is how much time is devoted to trying to understand the fiends. They, after all, were born of mothers, just like us, but then the trouble started. Bad childhoods, absent fathers, vice-laden neighborhoods. The intelligent fiction writer parses all that and tries to come up with a plausible reason for the evil one becoming so evil. The genre writers just accept that he's evil and needs to be done away with.

Of course it's also possible that some people are just evil from the beginning, but can you really imagine a tiny baby as evil from birth? Wouldn't that mean that Satan really was at work in our lives? Not likely. Something was either wrong with that child -- mentally (not his fault) -- or some adults are responsible for turning him toward the bad in his/her early life. But what do we do with those people who just can't abide by the rules we've set up and that we all live by?

The same debate has raged for a long time throughout civilized societies: punish the evil-doer or try to rehabilitate him or her? It still rages. [This is grist for another/different discussion.]

But back on a personal level, you can practice getting outside your own life -- your own worries and traumas and concerns -- by simply reading the newspaper, which is filled daily with stories about individuals and families much worse, and much worse off, than you. Just like the fiction writer, try to imagine yourself as one of those people -- either the victim or the perpetrator -- and construct, in your own mind, a story of how this came to pass. If you've had enough coffee and are feeling really inspired, imagine yourself as both! You may be ready to write a novel.

It's so hard to get ourselves out of our own predicaments and see things through the eyes of others. Our problems weigh on us so heavily, every day, that sometimes we think we're drowning. But if we can -- just for a moment, or an hour -- step back and take a deep breath, we might just begin to see things another way.

After all, you and I are one or two of billions of people who have inhabited the earth. Your parents and mine, and our grandparents, are four or eight or how many others. Still, we're like a pinprick in the great fabric of humans who have lived and died. If there is some eternal census taker, we're about the size of that last "i" I put into "died" in the previous sentence, or just the dot on the "i" -- minus many times. You and I are like specks in the universe viewed through one of the earliest of telescopes.

But we know that we matter, right? At least we hope so. We know that we're more than just existence. We lived, we loved, we had families. We bought things. We loved life more than we hated it (except for the suicides, who hated it more than they loved it). The religious among us think that we'll die and be rewarded in heaven for our exemplary lives, right?

But how exemplary is your life if you lacked empathy? If you couldn't put yourself in someone else's shoes and walk the mile that person did? If you were so caught up in your own suffering that you couldn't acknowledge that someone else, somewhere in the world, was suffering a lot more than you?

All over the world today, there are people born into unfortunate circumstances. Children raised in absolute poverty, eating bugs and the bark from trees. Can you imagine yourself doing that? Young girls are born every day into societies that let them be raped by men in the village if they have somehow violated old man-centered values. Some of these young women probably wish that they'd never been born at all. Can you -- male or female -- put yourself in that girl's body, feeling, for the first time, a big erect male penis entering your body when you're not in love, in the mood, not moist, not receptive? When you don't even know what sex is, much less love?

I doubt it. I can't, either. But until you and I can, we won't be able to stop that kind of atrocity.

Get outside your own life and try to imagine yourself a young man in Africa who works all day at shit jobs to try to make at least a buck or two to support your family that doesn't have indoor plumbing or telephones or even electricity -- no TV, no refrigerator -- and who comes home to a gang of toughs who ask if you want your arms hacked off "short sleeve" or "long sleeve": at the elbow or the wrist.

Which would you choose? I think I'd go for "long sleeve" which would leave me most of my arm. Both options cut off the hand and fingers.

Can you imagine making such a choice?

Get outside your life.

Forget the appliances and cars and lunches that make our lives here in the U.S.A. so nice -- and our sometimes trivial problems seem so monumental -- and think, instead, of people whose day-to-day doesn't involve who picks up the kids or whether Target stays open late enough for a run. Imagine, instead, life in another country -- maybe another time -- when evenings weren't just a time of trying to find something good on TV but were a time of waiting for that loud knock on the door, to be followed by big guys in uniforms bursting in, beating up your husband and hauling him away, maybe even shooting your teen-aged son, leaving you -- if you were spared -- to try to put your life back together again.

It happened in Nazi Germany, but it happens all over the world to this day.

Get outside your life and try to empathize. You don't have to do anything -- send money or march in the streets (not that it would do any good) -- but just thinking about it might change your outlook on life and your own fortunes. Can things get worse? Oh boy, you better know it!

It just might make you a better person. Try it. I'm as guilty as anyone, thinking my own problems are, sometimes, just too much to bear. Then I think of others -- actually try to put myself in their place, complete with the pain and terror -- and I have to (mentally) slap myself and say, "You big pussy! What are you complaining about! Snap out of it!"

The slap stings, but I know I deserve it. What a spoiled brat I am! What a big pussy!