Happy new year! Here’s hoping that all 2022 resolutions come true. My resolution has been on auto-repeat for at least 4 years. Simply put, within the year, I’m going to read my age in books—that’s one book for every year I’ve been alive. (To be precise, I’m talking about this life—a necessary caveat in case reincarnation is a thing.) So far, I’ve never managed to reach my goal, a goal that gets harder with each birthday. Which brings me to the only new year’s resolution that I’ve ever kept.
About 10 years ago, I committed to not judging others. It’s not a very original goal—I borrowed it from the Bible. “Judge not that ye be not judged.” My motive was not the quid pro quo pay off, that by not judging others, others would not judge me. I was more intrigued by the “Judge not” part of the passage. That’s the part I wanted to master, and it’s also the part that puts me in control. If I could get the first part down, then logically I wouldn’t care much if other people bothered to judge me. So, win-win.
I wasn’t sure how to go about not judging—I mean, people were feeding me so much material. I couldn’t resist getting in my digs. I decided to tailor my goal to one person. To quote a few lyrics, I started with the man in the mirror. Hence forth, I would only worry about not judging myself.
Really, it was good first step. Whenever I would judge myself, instead of reprimanding me for not sticking to my resolution, I would basically forgive myself. I totally let myself off the hook. When I would notice that I was judging myself again, I’d remind myself that I gave up that practice. I extended the gift of instant redemption…from me to me. It gets even better. When I would catch myself judging other people, which I continued to do routinely, rather than feel guilty or disappointed in myself, I would cut myself some slack. This approach helped me implement another passage in the Bible—the one about forgiving 70 X 7. I’m way past that on forgiving myself.
The better I got at not judging myself for my failings, the more comfortable I became judging everyone else. I did it with complete impunity—that is, I had no intention of feeling bad for thinking the worst about the human race. Hardly the behavioral modification I think the Bible was going for. The strange thing is, by practicing on myself first, I found my judgements losing their punch. I started questioning the accuracy of my judgements. Was it possible I was being unfair? Of course I was! (Something I was loathe to admit before.) I also found myself naturally counterbalancing my negative thoughts about a person by considering their positive attributes, including my own. That was also new for me. Most importantly, I relaxed a lot—I judged less, and when I did judge, I’d get less wound up than I did before, and the recovery was speedy.
I suppose there’s something to that old adage: if I can’t say [or think] something nice . . . it probably means I have only part of the story. Admittedly, to my utter delight, what I had was the juicy part.
Into the Comfort Zone 