When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself – Earl Nightingale
How do we judge a person to be good or bad? Or do we simply agree with the most popular of the cliches, “Everyone has some good and bad in them.” How do we judge whether someone is the right person to be your spouse, or maybe a friend or even a business partner? Or maybe the question is ‘do we judge others?’ Maybe we need to contemplate the inner self and ‘look in to the mirror’.
I was sitting in a train and was trying to enjoy my long journey that had just commenced (extra emphasis on trying). Suddenly the girl sitting in front of me, said in a very polite tone, “Excuse me, would you please exchange seats with my friend. She is in different coach.” That, followed by a long chain of PLEASEs’ made it unavoidable for me to not accept the request.
What got me thinking was the way she spoke. What is the probability that she would speak to me in a similar manner if she wasn’t ‘asking’? What if I was the one asking her the same? The attitude of a person when you are enjoying an advantage over them is completely, in a way, unreliable.
But then ill-behaving people too, may not always be the ‘evil’ ones. A man who has recently lost his wife cannot be expected to act amiably, in the strict sense of the word. Someone who has just been reprimanded by his boss over a trivial matter is likely to be as agitated as an active volcano. You poke, you pay. It might as well be the case that the boss himself was heated up over a family feud.
Next is the option of self-introspection, an aspect which remains pristine throughout the lives of majority of us. He’s a jerk! She’s arrogant! They’re not trustworthy! What are we? Do we have the honest answer to, perhaps, the most straight forward question that can be fired to us?
All that being said, it is indispensable for a person to commit a relationship or maybe a partnership with someone without knowing who they are or who they can be. Remorse is something no one wants as one of the building blocks of their life. That, conceivably, is the only reason we ought to glance at the life canvas of others.’ So to say that the only judgment that we are entitled to is ours, though not incorrect, is incomplete .
To fill this incomplete blank we need to learn that life is full of experiences and through them we learn to view the world from different vantage points. We learn there is no accounting for taste and perception. We need to learn to trust and as sure is the death of every mortal being, genuine trust is always reciprocated.