Judgment

I am conscious when I'm judging others.  It does happen although I try to curtail that kind of behavior as much as I can.  Sometimes it sneaks by all my established controls.

It's hard.  It helps if I think that we are all so different.  We have different genes, different home environment, different schools, different everything even if we may live in the same town or the same country.  Understanding that while we may seem the same we are all different for a myriad of reasons.  That helps me in not going all out in judging others.

A friend called me today from Italy.  She was asking about one of my brothers.  She couldn't understand why my brother doesn't behave in the same indifferent way as her brother.  She said her brother doesn't call her, doesn't communicate with her and shared many other things she's unhappy about.  I tried to explain her brother is a separate, unique, human being.  Different values, different family dynamics, different person, etc., etc.  It was difficult for her to understand that.  She kept comparing our respective brothers.  I know the focus was on the wrong place.  She couldn't understand he was a separate human being than she was and that her expectations had no place in the context of how he was behaving when push came to shove (American expression that, in this context, means that he would behave whichever way he wanted to behave).

Dare I say that the most important difference we have with each other is our soul?

I think that's where it starts. It's about our souls.  We have different souls.  Some of us are old souls, some of us are younger souls.  So respecting differences are paramount.  We don't have to understand how people's priorities, desires, and motivations may be so different.  What we need is to accept is that we are different and go on from there.

We can't be in somebody's else's skins.  We don't know what is in their hearts and souls. So I propose less judging and more accepting.  Live and let live.  Is it possible?