Free Yourself From Judging Life

Have you ever found yourself judging the way things are going in your life? I have done so countless times. Just a year ago, after conferring with the sales representative of a vanity press and being told my book might get published within a few months, I got impatient with the process when unexpected delays showed up. I was up in arms. I spent several weeks in a tizzy, arguing with life, judging the timing, the delay.

More recently, when the Coronavirus led to the closing of cafes, I resisted the shake-up to my usual morning routine of going to a café to write.

Both times, instead of pausing to ask, What good might be hidden here? or Why might the cosmos be doing things this way? I insisted Things are wrong because they aren’t going as I expected. I judged the circumstances.

“This isn’t the timing I bargained for” became the chant I repeated every day while I was waiting for a major publishing house to grant me permission to quote from their book. I lived in the soup of I want things to go this way, not that way.

I focused my eyes on the discrepancy between my expectations (six months) and what had transpired (a seemingly unending delay). With my eyes trained on the contrast and with my mind chanting the curses and thinking victim thoughts, I was stuck in a narrow tunnel and I was cut off from discernment. I was cut off from asking questions that might have led me to brighter pastures. There was no way for other perspectives to land on my radar; I was impervious to more expansive perspectives that included the possibility of a silver lining of immense value.

Recently I was reflecting upon the moments in my life when I’ve gone straight into judgment and I dwelled for an interval in the certainty that my judgmental attitude and ruffled feathers were justified and appropriate. Suddenly, I found myself wondering what the fox in The Little Prince might have to say about this judgmental pattern and the self-righteousness underlying it.
In Antoine de Saint Exupery’s classic book, the fox famously tells the little prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

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I wondered if the fox might say, When you judge, you’re missing what is essential. The heart may discern and detect, but it does not judge.

Stephen Covey might agree. In his bestselling book from 1989, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey implored us to seek first to understand before seeking to be understood:

A discerning empathic listener can read what’s happening down deep fast, and can show such acceptance, such understanding, that other people feel safe to open up layer after layer until they get to that soft inner core where the problem really lies.

To illustrate the power of this habit, he laid out two imaginary conversations, both beginning with a high school student saying to his father, “Boy, Dad, I’ve had it! School is for the birds.”

In one of the conversations, the father asked the son to tell him what’s wrong and when the son told him school’s “impractical” and said he “doesn’t get anything out of it,” the father asserted, “Well, you just can’t see the benefits yet, Son,” and went on to talk about his own experience back when he was a student. The son didn’t feel heard and the conversation broke down as the father continued on the trajectory of trying to get his son to understand his point of view.

In Covey’s second script, the father responds to the son by saying, “You feel like school’s not doing you any good.” When the son points out that his friend Joe dropped out of school to become an auto mechanic, the father says, “You feel that Joe really has the right idea.”

In short, the father suspends his judgment and sets aside his opinions. This not only allows him to be present to his son but also to be present to his own heart while being present to his son.

The son’s experience, his thoughts and feelings, were honored and heard, not dismissed. Within a minute they arrived at the “soft inner core” and the son opened up and shared with his father the real problem: just a few hours ago he had been shaken by the news of his astonishingly low scores on the reading test the students had recently taken.

Because the father let go of the compulsion to control his son’s perspective and behavior, he was free to hold the space for his son to express himself. Not only had the father created a safe space for the son when he let go of controlling the conversation, he also took on a vulnerable position, for he was open to be influenced by his son.

This kind of openness and vulnerability might have helped me a year ago when I was cursing life for not following my game plan. If I had approached the delay of my book’s publication with a willingness to release my image of how things should be progressing—if I had greeted the cards life was dealing with a willingness to change my point of view on the pace at which things should be moving forward—I might have stirred up a sense of expectancy and anticipation within me. Instead of chanting This isn’t the timing I bargained for, I might have adopted the chant, I wonder if there are good things hidden in this delayed timeline. A measure of curiosity might have emerged; I might have asked questions such as could there be a benefit I’m not seeing, perhaps a benefit I won’t be able to see until further down the road? I might have found myself liberated from the sense of impatience kept me growling at the gates of hell for a few weeks. (Impatience is never light, easy or fun.)

If I had let go of my need to be the boss in charge of micromanaging each detail in my life, I might have been more open to a dialogue with life, to listening to the river and the wind. If I had been willing to let go of judging life, circumstances and situations, I might have found it easier to breathe.

The fox is approaching and he’s whispering something sweet. “When you’re stuck in judgment, you miss what is essential. The heart’s eyes can see with discernment, but they don’t judge.”

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