On Judgment and the Homeless Man
There is a better way
From September 2015:
Okay, picture yourself walking down the street. It is in the middle of the afternoon. The sun is out. It is warm. The birds are chirping. You have been having a pretty good day. You are not thinking about anything in particular. You are just feeling pretty good. You feel good about the world and you feel good about yourself. You are walking along and then you come to the end of the block. You turn the corner around the building and suddenly, there about ten feet in front of you, is a homeless man sitting on the curb of the street. He is unshaven, his hair is matted, his clothes are tattered and torn and dirty, and he emits a foul odor. As you pass him, he turns to look at you. In the ten seconds between the time you first saw him and the time you have your back to him, walking past him down the street, how many judgments did you make?
Judgments, not observations! Observations are what we gather from our senses. We observed his hair and his clothes and his physical appearance. That is just raw data we take in through our senses. Judgments are how we react to those observations.
How did we judge that man? Did we judge him to be lazy? Did we judge him to be stupid? Did we judge him to be a danger to us? Did we judge him as a poor victim of society? Did we…
