My brother-in-law, Rabbi Shimon Galperin of Solon Ohio, shared this brain-teaser on our family’s “WhatsApp”. It’s probably floating around the internet. I’m not always so good at these mind games and brain teasers. It took me a couple of minutes, and then it dawned on me. Once you figure it out (or when you give up) there’s a valuable message below.
SPOILER ALERT!
Do not read below if you still want to try and figure it out.
The message is about empathy. Compassion and empathy are two different things. Compassion is what WE feel about someone in a particular situation, while empathy is the ability to see the issue as they do, from their perspective.
Here’s Dictionary.com’s entry on empathy: the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
And from Wikipedia: commonly defined as one’s ability to recognize, perceive and directly experientially feel the emotion of another… Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “put oneself into another’s shoes”, or experiencing the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself, a sort of emotional resonance.
Looking at the parking spots from our direction there seems to be no rhyme or reason. You play with the numbers this way and that, and nothing adds up. But turn it around and see it from the angle where the car entered and its actually quite simple.
Empathy is crucial in relationships of all kinds. They say now that empathy is even a valuable skill in customer relations, product development, management and business leadership. It helps teachers better understand their students, and parents relate to their children. And empathy is especially crucial in marriage. We once did a Torah-Tuesday class on Empathy based on Torah texts, it might to time to revisit it.
There’s a valuable lesson to be learned from this challenging parking space puzzle. It’s always helpful to see it from the other person’s perspective.