“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” – Mother Theresa
No matter if you’re religious or not, you cannot deny the wisdom behind these words. The message is clear and to the point, yet so easy to be disrespected.
It might be a common human flaw to judge easily and negatively other people. Whether we’re talking about a haircut we find particularly unflattering or a poor choice of matching colours in someone’s outfit, to more important topics like a friend’s decision to marry someone we don’t approve of or to quit their job to find their true self – it’s always easy for us to have strong opinions on other people choices.
What most of us don’t realize is that their opinions can sometimes result unfair and unnecessary. It’s all good when you get asked for advice, but one should never presume to know the right answer for someone else better than those people themselves.
But these is not quite what Mother Theresa meant to say, or at least not all of it. Judging someone based on their choices or lifestyles takes away from you the real pleasure of knowing someone. Starting any kind of relationship with a mental block because of some silly prejudice is downright sad and cuts any possibility for real love and understanding.
Even when we don’t understand someone’s motivations, even when people’s point of view are so different from ours we might as well come from different planets… it should always be a priority to try to be open minded. We might even learn our own ideas were not the best – because what else makes the world interesting if not the fact that we’re all different?
Sadly most societies raise us to have firm prejudices on thousands of different things, one for all being that our way is the best way. I hope we can somehow learn, while growing up, to be more accepting of the different.
the curious life 