These days I have been reading and thinking about compassion, sympathy and empathy. The words all share a linguistic root in the Greek pathos (emotion or feeling). Sympathy shares a closer linguistic root with empathy. Sympathy comes from syn + pathos, to have common feelings or emotions. Compassion’s roots pass through Latin, com + passio, to bear with or to suffer the passion of another. They are similar words, but not exact synonyms. Compassion is the broader word: it refers to both an understanding of another’s pain and the desire to somehow mitigate that pain. Sympathy implies that there is already an existing relationship of some nature that draw people together that to share the same emotion or feeling. Empathy is that capacity to understand the emotion or feeling of another even without that already existing relationship. It seems to me the human quality of empathy is foundational to all the others.