E is for Empathy

From the Memoirs of Billie Harper, looking back on her learning journey.

"Empathy is the willingness to listen with your whole self—and be changed by what your hear."

Understanding Empathy

Empathy isn’t always soft. Sometimes it arrives like a jolt—a sudden awareness that someone else’s pain is real, and close, and not yours to fix. Other times, it moves slowly, like water seeping into dry ground.

When I was young, empathy was taught through stories of kindness. Kindness itself was part of our learning circle intake—something to be studied, practiced, and forever included in learning. Not just listening to stories but listening inside them. Sitting with someone else’s version of the world, even if it made me uncomfortable. Especially then.

I recall entries from Jac’s journals during the Rebuild years. Accounts of neighbours who hadn’t spoken in years coming together to share a fire. Of children holding silence for lost species. Of grief so quiet it barely had words—but still, someone sat beside it.

Empathy, we learned, was not a performance. It didn’t need to announce itself. It asked more of us than sympathy. Not just “I see you,” but “I’m willing to be changed by seeing you.”

In our learning circles, empathy became a practice. We would read archival fragments aloud and then pass the speaking stone, offering reflections without correction. We learned to hold space for contradiction, complexity, and the discomfort of not knowing.

Mum used to say, “Empathy doesn’t mean you agree. It means you care enough to imagine it different.” And maybe that’s what saved us in the hardest years—our capacity to imagine and then adapt into gentler futures.

Empathy shaped our designs, our governance, our memory work. It reminded us that policy without compassion is just control. And that listening—real listening—is how societies begin again.