There was a oft-repeated joke doing the rounds in my youth about ‘understanding’ people ending up ‘suffering’. There are many versions of it and it went thus:

The boys of some school or other (the name depended on the narrator and where he schooled), poured down water on their teacher from the floor above. The rightly indignant master is supposed to have looked up and chastised the students for their unthinking (or premeditated!) action. Didn’t they know understanding people would suffer?!

Yeah, he apparently wasn’t too up on his English. ‘Under’ and ‘standing’ were two separate words for him and he took their meant the words literally. He is supposed to have meant that if those standing in the upper storey thoughtlessly (in this case wilfully!) poured water or threw things down, they, those standing underneath, would ‘suffer’ the consequences.

But

When you come to think of it, ‘understanding’ people (not those standing underneath, but those who relate to others and their feelings) do ‘suffer’. Don’t they?

Of course I don’t mean it the same way the school master did, though he definitely had a point. Hadn’t he suffered by getting wet while standing underneath? Anyway…. The ‘understanding’ I mean refers to the sympathetic awareness and tolerance we humans have towards others. It is the ability to comprehend others’s feelings, their actions and the situations they are in.

Look at it this way. If you are an ‘understanding’ person you ‘suffer’ because you feel the pain of others. their troubles affect you deeply, their helplessness at some level translates to your own helplessness. In short, comprehension in such cases is a burden you carry. In fact it is not joke at all, ‘understanding’ people indeed ‘suffer’!

©️ Shail Mohan 2024

April Blogathon is spilling over to May due to unforeseen circumstances. The important thing for me is to complete it. So though late, here I am! 🙂