On judgment, stagnation, and harmony
A November journal entry
I am naturally—well, it’s not natural; it’s actually learned—a judgmental person. But I’ve gotten much better with it over the years.
Whatever that means.
Part of this improvement is the fact that I’m better at holding my tongue. But I also do, deep within, hold less judgment, having become more aware of the fact that people are the way they are for good reason . . . And that if I stood in their shoes, I very likely would be exactly like them.
It sometimes seems like we’re less forgiving of the people we love the most—the people with whom we spend the most time, whose habits and tendencies we’re most accustomed to. It’s a weird thing.
The most annoying habits, the habits we judge the most, are like a trickling faucet. To guests, it’s hardly noticeable. But to us, it’s a top-tier to-do list item.
And I guess we aren’t always less forgiving of our loved ones since we’re certainly, for example, more likely to road rage on a stranger.
But that’s probably because we’re less likely to be cut off on the road by our brother or mother.
I’m doing my best—again, whatever that means—to judge less. To forgive more. Especially with the people I love. And not just to keep the peace, but to truly think better of others . . . And ultimately, of myself.
Because everything that comes out is merely an indication of what’s going on within.
But I just can’t get around the fact that I want better for the people I love.
In their eyes, I’m judging. But the way I see it is that if I truly love someone, then I want the best for them. And if I know they could do better, then, well, I ought to try and push them to be better.
But people don’t like this.
People don’t like it when you suggest that maybe, just once, they don’t eat an entire family-size bag of chips in one sitting.
Recent life has had good moments and bad moments. I have minutes, and sometimes hours, of feeling hopeful and upbeat . . . And then I have other periods in which I don’t feel so good. Sometimes, it’s the nature of my condition. Other times, it’s because I feel trapped, unable to live life as I normally prefer, still in recovery from surgery.
I appreciate my home in the suburbs a lot. I do. But it drives me out of my mind sometimes. Life is so stagnant. I feel like I’m in a ghost town. Perhaps that’s just because winter’s coming. Or perhaps it’s because all my friends moved to the city.
I realized yesterday that at least one thing (if not everything) I’m doing with my writing is attempting to get to know God.
You know—to make sense of the world.
I only realized this because I’ve been intentionally getting to know God recently by reading the Bible, praying, and watching Dewayne Noel’s (who started Dry Creek Wrangler School) Tack Room Bible Talk, along with Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series.
And with some of this newfound knowledge (if that’s what you’d call it) has come an early-stage awareness of life’s interconnected beauty.
I may have noticed it before, but only in fragments.
This whole newsletter thing is my attempt to “write my way through life,” clarifying what doesn’t make sense, getting to know myself, resolving my frustrations, etc. But what I’m really doing is working to understand how the world works, piecing together my conception of and relationship with what I realize more and more each day is a divine masterpiece.
Each attempt—via journaling or an effort to understand a concept that doesn’t make sense—is one step closer to the Truth (emphasis on the capital T). But the more the picture is revealed to me, the more clear it becomes that I will never fully know what’s going on. As in, what life is.
And so, I wonder, how could a human know God?
But I think that’s not the point because one needn’t completely understand every atom of someone’s being in order to have a friendship or even an intimate relationship with them. In fact, it is impossible to totally know someone, just like it must be impossible for us to totally know God.
It seems, then, that our task in getting to know God is more of a journey without any single destination. But still, at what point do we have a relationship with God? At what point—many, including myself, may wonder—are we let into Heaven? You know? At what point does someone move from simply another human being in your vicinity to a peer to a friend? Where is the line? Is there a line? How could there be?
It is kind of a funny concept . . . Perhaps humans, for their desire to compartmentalize things like to be able to draw lines and become frustrated when they can’t, and therefore reject those things around which their fleshy selves cannot put in a box.