Foodonate and The Power of Compassion and Forgiveness
By: Sebastian Abarca
Tags: Food Insecurity, Compassion, Emotional Intelligence, Nonprofit, Covid 19

This year, I have learned a lot of things. One of the most important is how to be more human in this society that moves quickly without stopping to think about what is happening, without caring about others. Below, I will share some of the reflections I have made on my Compassion and Forgiveness class thanks to my professor Matthew Davis, and the experience I have gained with my non-profit.

Be grateful, I think this is one of the most important things we should remember every time we feel bad, angry, or sad because you are alive reading this article, you can read, you have a computer that you can use to learn, you have a family, food, health, and I could continue with a large list of things you should be grateful for. Sometimes, we complain about life, but what we don’t realize life gives us a lot of good things. What do we give in exchange?

While working on Foodonate, I have had the pleasure of changing the way of thinking of some people about helping others with fewer opportunities. When we started this project, many people told me why are we helping the homeless, if they decided to be like that, they are drug addicts that don’t want to work, etc. I always explain to them that not everyone has the same opportunities, not everyone makes the best decisions, then they end up living in the streets without believing in themselves, they can’t get a job because they smell bad, and no one wants to hire them. They get kicked out of most of the places they go. They feel hungry, sad, and think they need to use drugs to escape from that. So, not because they couldn’t have or take the opportunities, they deserve the worst. At the end of the day, all of us are human beings, and we all have the same needs: food, shelter, and love.

Sometimes, things don’t happen as you planned, but you have to be prepared for that and know how to deal with your emotions when the time comes. Always knowing that if you did your best, you should be happy because you tried and learned. Love yourself and remember, you can’t control everything. As Kristin Neff says in her book Self-compassion, “Self-compassion is a powerful form of emotional intelligence. It can free us from the emotional reactivity that so often rules our lives..If you are someone who tends to ruminate or who suffers from anxiety and depression, it’s important that you don’t judge yourself for this way of being.”

I really liked this sentence in Martin Luther King’s book, Strength of love, “hate multiplies hate, Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that”. What he means is that if we love others, love will multiply. If you help someone today, that person may help someone else another day. That’s the beauty of giving, hoping that one day, that person can give to another. I have gone through difficult times in my life, in which I thought everything was going wrong, luckily I had help from good people who did not expect anything from me. Thanks to these people, I am here now helping others, grateful for what I have and what I don’t, hoping that whoever we have helped can help another person one day, and thus expand that love for helping the other. According to Frans De Waal on the Age of empathy Humans reflect the power of unconscious synchrony, which means that we copy other’s actions sometimes. The individual who doesn’t stay in tune with what everyone else is doing will lose out. If we have compassion for others and help them, other people will see it and will do the same, but if instead of that, we just don’t care about the ones who need more help, others will see, and won’t help because they think it’s ok. Let’s spread this message and help.

In conclusion to all these reflections and experiences, always be grateful for who you are, what you have, and help the ones with fewer opportunities if you can. It’s going to make you extremely happy and the other person too. Spread love, compassion, and forgiveness against hate and resentment. And just as we work hard to become better professionals every day, we should also focus on our emotional intelligence because emotions are what makes us humans and not robots, if we don’t know how to control our emotions, it’s going to have consequences in our life.