Judging is like teaching a sloth speed -

Judging is like teaching a sloth speed

06 October 2020

If you were born a gazelle, the sloth will probably be a stupid, useless animal to you. Slow, dangling from a tree and eating leaves. But your mission in life is to run to avoid predators, while he does it trying to go unnoticed. Eagles and jaguars see him less if he goes slow. So the moral is: is there such a thing as objectivity? No! If we exclude offences, nothing in our worldview is objective! It's the lens with which we look at reality. It's our pattern. And there are as many patterns as there are human beings. Each one with its degree of evolution, with its mission in life, with its vision of things. Some are born sloth and some are born gazelles. As Albert Einstein used to say, "a fish will always feel stupid if you tell it it has to climb a tree." That's why judging... doesn't make sense. We often outrage ourselves for things that seem objectively unbearable and unfair. But the concept of "right" and "wrong" is really labile and I will give you a very strong example to support this statement. Some time ago they told me about buying and selling children in Brazil, in the favelas. Very poor people who sell their children to survive. My first reaction was anger and rejection of what I was hearing. Then, the person in front of me deepened the explanation. Children in the shacks risk being devoured by wild animals and parents with large offspring sell one to save others. They do this by praying all day, accompanying him to a fate they consider better. They do it thinking it is the only possible way out. Once I understood the situation in its dramatic totality, my judgment had died down. It had become compassion, understanding. My glasses had changed lenses. That doesn't mean at all that we have to tolerate everything and stop following our ideals. It means understanding diversity and stopping a second before judgment. I notice that what I see is different from me. And I'm going to stop there, without going any further. Difficult? Yes. But no one has ever said that the most important things in life are easy...