Empathetic Imagination

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Here's an exercise for when you're laying in bed tonight.

Close your eyes and think of someone in your life, someone very close to you or not particularly close.

Then try to imagine, deeply, what it would be like to be them. To inhabit their physical body, with whatever strengths and weaknesses it has. To live with their spouse, have their job, have their mindset. To have their problems, worries, joys.

I've always loved the line from the novel Atonement in which Briony the young main character of the book, who longs to be a writer, first uses her imagination not to create a fantasy/romance in which she herself is the princess but to imagine what it would be like to be her sister. "Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?" The idea that everyone's reality is just as enveloping and compelling as one's own is a strange and daunting thought.
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