One thing you’ll notice about compassion, lovingkindness, and sympathetic joy is that they have a preference for what’s good, and an understanding that pain and suffering is a misfortune we all face. And yet that preference for the good, and seeing what’s painful as a misfortune, will keep us in our reactivity. With deeper wisdom, as we become intimate with life, as we have lived long enough and felt into what an actual human life is like, we see that there is this up and down motion: there’s pleasure and good fortune, then states that are very difficult when we experience pain and loss. To be an open-hearted human means that we have to come to terms with the fact that there will be some pleasure, there will be some pain, and that we don’t have much control over that. And so equanimity grows over time, with perspective.
