Ridiculous, downright ridiculous, such a big suitcase. Two of those exceptionally large suitcases even, direct enough to block the whole thing. Oh, and his traveling companions already have a large suitcase with them. Come on, if you need such a big suitcase, you can’t distinguish main from side issues. Then stay home, okay?
Only when all those oversized suitcases were on the train and we had found our seat did I wonder why those large suitcases had bothered me so much. Why did I even form an idea about who these people are, and what mindset they have in lugging those suitcases on the train?
I don’t get any further than projecting my own desire for minimalism and light travel onto the company. (This time I’ve perfected light travel to the point where I’ve been wearing the same stockings for three days. Would that work on my system?) But then again, I could have just felt sorry for them, because who wants one of those drag along a suitcase? What’s wrong with me that I think so badly about people I don’t even have anything to do with?
Toddler
However, last year I already received a strong lesson from life, also on an international train. Then I thought I could judge the parents of a toddler sitting across the aisle. We went from Berlin to Brussels, which is quite a distance, especially for a toddler. The parents looked at their phones, the child had been given an old paperback to amuse himself with. When the whining continued and the parents began to argue among themselves whether or not the child could have a cookie, my companion, who was sitting further away, asked what the problem was. “These parents are the problem,” I said. “They didn’t think before they got on the train, and now they have nothing to keep their child busy and they also start fighting over a cookie.”
Then the father said: “I also speak Dutch, madam. We’re sorry, it’s our first child, we don’t have much experience.” If only he had just called me a bitch or punched me in the face – I would have understood. But this, this calm and gentle expression of understanding for my shortcomings, this was too bad. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more ashamed in my life. (I still collapse when I think about it. There are not even any excuses for this. If I had been stressed or pressed for time, I was on vacation. I had nothing on my mind at all, except that I had just wanted to read a book at my leisure.)
I resolved to become a better person. First working point: don’t judge others. “Maybe start by not judging out loud,” a friend advised. “Everyone judges, that’s what people do. That is what moves us forward.” That judgment is something we make in a split second, based on a ridiculously small amount of information – just like we had to do when we served as food for wild animals.
But just because there is an evolutionary basis for all that judgment does not mean that it actually helps us in this day and age. The grounds on which we judge rarely hold up under (self-)critical scrutiny. Do I really need to dismiss women as insufferable just because they vaguely resemble the girl who stole my best friend decades ago? (It took me years to figure out this link myself.)
Not only does most of that judgment make no sense, nothing good comes of it either. All that judgment also stands in the way of a decent conversation, and therefore understanding, empathy, and a better world. If only I had just asked those people on that train from Berlin to Brussels what their daughter’s name was, how old she was, and what language she was raised in – just a chat like parents among themselves, in which I might even If I could have offered my writing materials and notebook to the toddler to keep busy, everyone would have felt a lot better.
The silly thing is that deep down I’ve known for a while that you’ll have a better conversation if you transcend your immediate judgment. A few years ago I was allowed to participate in a group discussion in which the rule was that if you judged you were not allowed to speak, it was better to go outside for a while. That immediately took the conversation to a higher level.
Sign of the times
I didn’t do much with that experience at the time, but it stayed with me. And I think about it every time someone says “no judging” or “without judging” or “I have no judgment about it”, something I hear more and more often. These are turns of phrase that I see as a good sign of the times, a time in which social and emotional sensitivities are becoming sharper. But I can’t help it, when someone says “no judging”, I immediately feel judged, backed into a corner as someone who can’t keep her judgments where they belong. What’s wrong with judging, I sometimes want to say – thinking about how I have forged entire friendships based on judgments, preferably formulated as sharply as possible. Judging about the hypocrisy of adults, the superficiality of peers who showed their bare bellies over neat jeans, the meaninglessness of pop music that was not gothic, the Flemish farmhouse, the whole materialistic mess together – ah, it was wonderful to judge!
Anyway, there are of course plenty of things that are very pleasant on the surface, but destructive in the long term. Time to face up to the fact that all that judging is at best an easy kick (heh, look how good we are!), but it doesn’t yield any results. The big question remains: how do you do that, suspend your judgment, if it is such a deeply ingrained reflex? You can take a deep breath every time you feel yourself judging yourself and say nothing for a moment – not only does this avoid painful situations, it is usually enough to push that judgment aside as irrelevant and thoughtless.
What also helps is that with every judgment you consider where it possibly comes from. Such a judgment often says more about yourself than about the person being assessed. For example, for years I have had a kind of instinctive hatred of people with a perfectly organized household, those people who act as if it is logic itself that you have everything in order – as if it doesn’t even take any effort. It is only since I have learned to live with my own limited household skills that I have been able to see and appreciate such a well-organized household for what it is.
Trees
“When you enter the forest, you see all those different trees. (…) You look at the tree and you see it as it is. (..) As soon as you get close to people, you lose that way of seeing. Then it’s ‘you’re too much like that, or I’m too much like that’. Your judgmental mind steps in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means that I learn to appreciate them as they simply are.” Turning people into trees: it is the most useful advice that my search for ways not to judge has yielded so far (I found it on the site of The Marginalian, where Maria Popova brings together centuries of life wisdom from art, books, science and philosophy ).
Although it also makes me realize that I still have a long way to go, because I also have feelings about trees (yes, just laugh, if you really want to judge!). In every forest there is at least one tree that at first glance I find more sympathetic than the others. Even though there is rarely a tree that actually works on my system, that is already a win.
