Passing judgement
Musings about being right, being wrong, and a bird with a bad reputation
I used to think that life was a binary existence.
You were either wrong or right. Events were either good or bad. Good things should be repeated, bad things should be avoided. Trying to improve yourself or your behavior was a good thing. Not working towards betterment was a bad thing.
I’m tired of passing judgement.
It’s exhausting, and on top of that: it’s not even true.
Events, behavior, people themselves… are what they are. All the rest of it is our own judgement: what we make of them, how we hold them against the light of our own personal set of inner values, how we choose to see them and pass judgement on them.
I’d like to try and find a bigger and more solid patch of middle ground. Explore a new terrain called Neutral. Or: it is what it is.
That’s quite a challenge. One of the most strong and eloquent characters our Inner Critic takes on, is the Judge. Quick to scan sitations and draw conclusions, quick to judge and pass sentences. The Judge is an inner voice that we often don’t even realize is speaking, but who rules so much of our lives. Or mine, at least.
Still, I have long since come to recognize the good old Judge. And I have made great progress in treating him kindly but not listening to him or taking his words too seriously. But sometimes you will hit situations where some deep old part of that same old pattern is playing out, and you will find yourself doing the same old exorcism exercise again.
(There’s no shame in this. Like I have written before: people are onions. Dealing with our pain and our patterns is a work of peeling them, layer by layer.)
So it seems I’m once again in the process of peeling.
I try to observe myself, the things I do, feel and need, without passing judgement. I try to stay in Neutral. I allow things to be what they are without trying to change them.
What surfaces in the process is a duet between fear and need. Fear of not being good enough, need of praise and acceptance. Fear of getting hurt (or hurting others), need to belong and feel safe.
These are emotions as old as mankind itself, and working with them sometimes feels like wading through a patch of deep, tough mud.
But I’m getting there. And if I’m not, that’s okay, too. See, I’m learning.
Too much relativising is usually a bad thing — you risk ending up with an ‘anything goes’ amoral attitude to life, and I do believe that it is important to hold on to values like love, respect and truth, for instance. But for someone like me, relativising a little, passing for once on passing judgement, can be a very good thing.
Sometimes, when I tell people I really like magpies, I get an account of all the nasty behavior these birds demonstrate: they are quarrelsome, they raid other birds’ nests, they scavenge, they steal (shiny things)…
Looking at an article about magpie behavior the other day, I was especially touched by the following phrase: It owes his reputation as a robber of nests mainly to the fact that it does so during the day time. Birds who do the same at night usually go unnoticed.
Hmm, do I notice a flaw in the judicial system there? Or how context can be more telling than facts…
Another feature that makes magpies appear less friendly or cuddly to most people is the fact that they will eat dead animals or trash. They are not picky when it comes to food, they clean up. In fact, they are some sort of minitature vultures (you know how I love vultures! and if you don’t, here’s why…)
So I’ll not pass any judgement on the magpie and its activities, nor on my deep liking for them. I will just enjoy my preference, and smile every time I see them fly past our window, perch in one of our trees and land in the nest they have constructed high up in one of our oaks over the last few weeks.
In a few weeks we’ll have a whole family of them. And I’ll be even happier.
I now respectfully ask the Judge to refrain from any possible comments.
