Let’s try something. Ask someone to take a photo of you. Now look at that photo and compare what the camera sees to what you think you look like.
I never see the same thing as the camera. Sometimes my posture isn’t as good as I think it is. Other times I look skinnier on film than in my mind. My hair might be longer or shorter than I envision. My nose has been known to grow larger and more crooked for the camera. How I see myself and how I am are not the same.
It doesn’t stop there. Occasionally someone will ask me if I’m 6’1” or if I’ve lost weight. I stopped growing before I was twenty and my weight has remained almost the same for thirty years. How others see me is not how I am either.
And this is just the outside package! Most of who I am is on the inside.
My inside has been shaped by every experience I’ve ever had. We’re talking about the millions and millions of experiences since I left the womb. My memories and perceptions of these experiences also shape me. External factors affect who I am, too. I might say one thing when you catch me after a yoga practice and another when I’m having a stressful day. All these variables produce an infinite number of possibilities for how I might behave or what I might think in any given situation. Imagine….so many people running around in one body.
So how do I narrow these possibilities down to figure out who I am?
I have an internal guidebook. It contains my values and moral code. Something along the lines of Follow these rules to be this kind of person. I try my best to follow the rules but it’s hard and I don’t always succeed. There are times I hear my internal voice saying “You shouldn’t have done that” or “Stop thinking that” or “A person like you doesn’t do something like that”. We all make mistakes – things we didn’t want to do because they’re not consistent with who we want to be.
The truth is it’s impossible for me to know exactly who I am. There are too many possibilities for who I can be and I don’t follow my guidebook all the time. It’s even more impossible for other people to know who I am. Or for me to know who they are. We don’t know anyone else. All we know is what they show us at a given moment in time and we interpret that through the lens of who we are at that moment in time.
So why do I judge other people? I don’t know who they are and they have reasons for being who they are.
And why do I care what other people think about me? They don’t know who I am. All that should matter is whether I’m doing my best to be the type of person I want to be.
The lesson is simple – judge not and care not. Easy to say. Not easy to do.
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