Where does love begin? Here is a story that offers an idea.
“When she woke up on the morning of Oct. 25 and read her text messages,” writes Heather Knight, “Robyn Sue Fisher couldn’t stop crying and shaking.
She learned from an employee that overnight someone had smashed the front windows of her shop, Smitten Ice Cream, in the Mission District of San Francisco and spray painted the store with graffiti. One message read “FREE PALESTIEN” — apparently spelling Palestine wrong — and another read “OUT THE MISSION.”
At first, Robyn Sue Fisher, who is Jewish, decided to close Smitten Ice Cream, and boarded it up. But then something changed. Fisher describes her emotional arc like this, “At first I felt fear and then I felt anger and then I felt a deep sorrow,” she said. “And then I felt empathy, and that’s how I got to love.”
Fisher decided to reopen her store by Thanksgiving. She wrote a letter to her community explaining her decision and focusing on love. She created a line of t-shirts that reads, “In the spirit of ice cream, I choose LOVE.”
“People have donated more than $70,000 to a GoFundMe campaign to help Fisher repair the damage to her store,” writes Knight, “and to pay her employees’ lost wages. Two teenage girls recently stopped by to cover the shop’s plywood in red and white hearts.”
How does love begin after something painful has happened to us? Where does love begin again after anger and sorrow? With empathy, which is love’s first step, a step that enables us to be able to feel again.
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