I did not expect life to reward me. I did not expect the world to respect my boundaries and limitations. I did not believe fairness was out there in the world and that i was entitled to it. I expected a shared commitment: a collective decision that fairness matters because we decide it matters, because we make it matter, because human beings cannot live together without it. I expected the promise to carry weight.

The heart reaches out, the conscience recoils. The result is the quiet gaze of the onlooker, the bystander’s posture. Seeing harm, feeling its weight, but remaining still. It is not lack of care that stops them, but fear of the moral work that true empathy would require.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love… Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,

Proportionality is why we instinctively feel it’s wrong to, say, banish someone from society just because they failed to pay a parking ticket or because they relapsed into addiction. There’s a deep human intuition that responses to wrongdoing or hardship should not destroy a person’s basic dignity and prospects. The law isn’t always so compassionate, but the ideal persists as a guiding light.

If punishment isn’t meant to help me understand what I ought not to do, then what was it for?