Nike Freeks Wrestling

The flea palace

"After all, that's how things are. Why we can truly share the pain of another person, for the first what the other person has to share our own reality. When and console a girl who cries because a piece ... its fragile toy is broken, when we swear to anorexia, which is skeletal but you can still see obesity, which definitely is not overweight when we listen resigned the ravings of our best friend, for being angry with the world betrayed by a woman without value that was no more than two weeks; when we try to distract you until the arrival of her psychiatrist the mentally ill that he believes has stolen a pigeon's soul and chases all the pigeons in the square to search inside their beaks, in all these cases we are close to these people, but look their pain from afar. The girl who shed tears for something so trivial, an anorexic who lives far away from reality, the unfortunate friend who does not understand that it is worth suffer for such a woman, unable to comprehend that the madman the poor pigeons fluttering about in search of cement grains and not intangible and elusive souls, all of them can expect we have a certain level of care and compassion, consolation, or solidarity. And in most cases they get . We are certainly able to fill the role of comforting. Seeing how many absurdities say because of their suffering, and how much suffering because of the nonsense that they say, is also likely that in the end we feel emotionally close to them ... but we do not go well. These people can ask and receive perhaps our hospitality in one of those moments, but there can be convinced to join the their reality. We can sympathize with or even love them as long as you do not really expect that we share the their pain. "

Elif Shafak, The Flea Palace.