Who died and made you Judge?

Life can be so funny sometimes. In line with the lifelong tradition of change, we can find humour in its inner workings. You and I are not the same people as we were last year; the more years, the more evidence. I won’t take credit for that amazing discovery. I will however explore the way in which our natural human tendencies to spit out opinions can prove hard to swallow later on.

I experienced this ‘Um…can I take that back?’ several times.

So there I was, cute little sweet sixteen, looking at the world from a foggy dewed point of view. And boy, did I have an opinion or two. I would look at the girl sitting across from me in class and begin the very normal process of mental criticism. Hmm….her shoes must mean this and her hairdo is a clear sign that. I started making labels for the types of girls and boys I knew by the way they appeared to live, obviously putting myself in the best category. I made a personal note to abstain from certain behaviours that the less revered ‘categories’ displayed. My value system is unique to me, and yours to you. So the kinds of people I most highly regarded will likely differ from yours.

Before you ‘tsk tsk’ me for having judged the fellow inhabitants of my environment, I ask you to deny doing it yourself. Uh huh, that’s right. Even if you are the next Dalai Lama, you probably had a moment of cast judgement when you were a kid and saw another kid wet his pants. That piss is the science of this social formula. You can hold your urine until you reach the toilet, and that other child of the same age cannot. You judge him for that. We know our past and present selves, and then the appearances of our surroundings. We naturally compare and contrast ourselves with the things comparable and contrastable around us. For example, I chose to drink Alexander Keiths and that person chose to drink Hoegaarden. Or I chose to eat beef nachos and that person won’t eat any meat or cheese; they’re vegan. It is so easy here to slip and be a critic of a lifestyle/choice that you don’t share. There are people we admire, and that is because we connect with them on some regard, or aspire to. Then with those we cannot connect with, disconnect with, we may automatically put ourselves above them. It is a self defence mechanism, the way we justify our lives to ourselves. The lifestyles we don’t share are in turn unknown to us, and through ignorance and self preservation we might criticize the road untraveled.

That is, until we happen to go there by chance.

I had a general impression of who I was, who I am, and who I was going to be. Well, scrap that. The only constant is change, and so we ought to make our minds more flexible. I had a strong opinion on love and relationships, work and success. It turns out I fall outside the lines that I drew. And the more things I consider, the more I realize I am not fitting the criteria I once posed for myself against the world. The problem was in that mentality: ‘myself against the world’. It is impossible to define the extent of yourself before you are done with life. How can you say what you will or will not do until you are on your deathbed? You don’t know if you might steal one day; perhaps a turn in life made you the epitomy of poverty and an opportunity presents itself to the starved…Another extreme: I know a crackwhore and I could judge her many times over, but I won’t. I have learned that several small decisions or events out of your control can lead you to become someone completely different than you planned to be. I could choose a different route to work one day, trying something peculiar, surrounding myself with strangers, and have a downward spiral to a similar scenario as she. I will not be a judge of anyone, or at least I will try.

I had this change of heart over a duration of maturation. There was no extreme event to cause this self-awareness, just living. I grew to notice when people made quick criticisms of strangers as well as friends. It does not matter how well you know the other person/people or what they did, a judgement is undue. For all you know, they might think the same of you.

I briefly discussed this thought with my best friend and we agreed that the more you live the more likely it is that you will cross the lines you drew. The more you experience, the more you will have in common with other people, other people you may have previously judged. Unless you live a strict routine, decades on end, you cannot escape the enlightenment of your years. Even then, those closest to you will force you to open your mind in some way because we all change somehow over the years. So I dare you to be open to that change and therefore open to the differences in people. You just might live more like your neighbour tomorrow than you did today.

And there is no right way to live.