Empathy is a muscle, of course.
But here some visions explode all fiber and exhaust any sinew before they flex, as if someone said: Lift Pluto, carry eternity.
What do you make of the woman who looks like your granny hauling bricks up the road in a bag wrapped around her head at 8:30 AM, before your workday begins? Is there any connective tissue of “walk a mile in her shoes” or any tendon you can call on to understand the world and the nature of experience as she does?
No books or lessons or trying to do the right thing will put the hand of your heart into her world, allow you to know the weight of one single step she takes.
Since, presumably, she carries her bricks up to where the road has washed out (clearly for the thousandth time) you have to wonder how much better her life is than it might have been before progress arrived here in the form of the British and the advances of oil and whatever else means makes grandma’s beast of burden life what it is.
But I don’t know how to see her or the world she lives in, as I say.
Except to suspect that the endless potholes and deplorable roads serve those of us who drive by better than they do her.