NAIROBI, Kenya: Do not judge so that you may not be judged.
The Bible says in Matthew 7:1, “I like to think of myself as a nonjudgmental person, someone who understands people’s questionable choices. I really try not to judge.”
The point of life, however, is to teach us to introspect aspects of our lives, and some introspection has taught me that I can’t be fully nonjudgmental. Not pointing fingers isn’t the same as not judging.
Naturally, you will have judged before you make the deliberate decision not to point a finger. You judge within the confines of your thoughts or those shared with a close friend and decide to keep the thoughts there.
The journey of life teaches us through mistakes, failures and heartaches of how uncertain life is and the complexities of the human mind. The complexities of personality choices and priorities also allow us to be more accommodating of contradicting life choices people make even though we foresee how catastrophic some endings will be. We understand that some of our choices are as questionable to our friends as theirs are to us but to each their own.
Judgment, though, allows us to be as human as possible. Without judging others, we wouldn’t be able to make informed decisions for ourselves.
We wouldn’t be able to have grace to accommodate friendships through questionable shocking phases and neither would we be able to call out our friends through their weird life choices.
All friendships survive judgements, we may not say it out loud but we are for sure thinking it and talking about it in other circles.
To say you do not judge is not true because you may really be trying not to judge your friends but you are judging someone else. In a constant social media era, someone’s business is always making news, being discussed, and being made fun of.
All the psycho-analysis we do based on what we know about people, their previous choices, business decisions, and career choices is still deep in judging.
The cowardly choices of our politicians and how they maneuver everyday politics, why it’s making us mad and bitter, and the role different institutions are playing in the madness—we couldn’t even if we tried. It’s all over, plastered in the media. All social platforms highlight these terrible choices, and the only way we can get past it is to judge and then judge and judge some more, trying to come up with a reason why.
We judge so that we may feel good about our choices, and it helps us hold ourselves to higher, better standards. Without judgment, would sanity even exist?
