Compassion: Am I kind and thoughtful enough? This question has stuck with me throughout my happy and lucky life. The question was initiated by an experience I had as a young man. Many years ago, I had the opportunity to go to school for a period of time in Krakow, Poland. It was at the height of the Cold War (1) and the Eastern European environment was extraordinary and distant for a sheltered Canadian boy. At the border between East and West, there were soldiers armed with Kalashnikov machine guns, barking police dogs, and reams of barbed wire: nobody smiled. You felt like you were entering a place only envisioned in a John le Carré spy novel (2).