Seeing Through Your Eyes

Being in this world, we create relationships with the people we are surrounded with. We share our stories, feelings, and experiences. There are times when we can actually perceive what our friends or our relatives are telling us. This is when empathy steps in. To me, empathy is a characteristic of a person that enables to feel and fully understand what others are going through. Interdependence also plays a big role in our lives. Without it, we would not be able to accomplish the famous historical achievements, such as our first landing on the moon. Being involoved in interdependence, I have learned that it brings people together to succeed whether an assignment, a project, or a dream.

Developing empathy takes a while to fully gain. You have to learn from life long lessons and use it as a reference for experiences yet to come. To have empathy for others is to actually know and feel what it is like to "be in their shoes". An example of empathy would be a friend who is going through family problems. Everyone has experienced this type of issue, including me. Whether it is about a loss of a family member or fighting parents. It could be about something small-scale such as getting a bad grade on an exam. The main point is that we can all help each other and give each other advice from our past experiences.

Empathy and Interdependence comes in one package. Once we are able to perform empathy, we can now collaborate with interdependence. A famous historical figure has once said "A house divided amongst itself cannot stand". Through all that I have been through, this statement has proven to be true. In english, we were assigned a progect entitled "KC3". It stands for Kids Creating Community Content. My group has chosen to focus on the renewable resources aspect of Hawaii. This project requires full contribution from each one of us. If a partner does not carry our his or her task, the whole group is affected. However, we all perservere each other, and make sure that we have fully succeeded our individual task. Not only have we learned about interdependence doing this project, we have also discovered how amazing it is to have the privelege to work and learn together.

Empathy and interdependence are not only meant to be used in our emotional part of our lives. We can also use them for education purposes. An example would be in the academic subject, English. For writing and critiquing essays, we abide to one motto. The motto states to "show not tell". By using this motto, we can understand empathy a little better. If the essay contains a high standard of "showing" the reader can easily see, hear, taste, smell, or feel the story, as if he or she were actually in the piece. When learning while associated with interdependence, we are able to share our new knowledge with the people we work with, therefore the outcome of the group is now a high-professional standard. If we all share the knowledge with others, and not keep it to ourselves, we can all benefit by depending on others, if we too contribute to the group.

In my experiences with empathy, I find that I can easily relate to others. Throughout my 14 years of my life, I have been through positive and negative situations. Taking what I have learned from these situations, I try my best to use my experiences as a reference when empathizing. Empathy comes naturally to me. When anyone comes to me for advice, or just to vent out their problems, my mind is set to fully focus on them. When it comes to interdependence, I am willing to contribute my ideas, and respect others' thoughts as well. Learning about the famous historical figures, they have not achieved everything they have on their own. They had to go through trial and error, which involved experience with people. If you think about it, we can't do anything without depending on each other. Everything started with a dream, but before the dream came inspiration.

Having empathy and interdependence in our lives creates a big impact on everyone. We are able to understand each other, and find out how we individually think. Comparisons of our personalities are also discovered using empathy. We are able to create relationships, and collaborate in recreational activities. Empathy along with interdependence should be thought more as gifts rather than a characteristics.