Here’s a question that may have occurred to you at some point: why does it seem easier to love some people than others? The answer is so simple it may surprise you.
There is a single habit of thinking, one that the vast majority of us engage in without knowing we’re doing it, that explains why some people seem to be easier to love than others. When we really love someone, the impulse to judge them is suspended.
It’s our own judgment about a person that can make someone seem hard to love, or even unloveable. But if we really look at someone without judgment, there is no reason not to love them, and the very human impulse to love comes shining through.
The instant we judge someone, who they really are becomes invisible to us. All we can see about them is our own judgment, which has nothing in the world to do with who they are.
Looking and seeing without judgment is probably foreign to most of us. We’re so accustomed to judging everything and everyone around us, we tend to do it automatically, and without it rising to the level of our conscious awareness.
There’s also a tendency to do it very quickly, the moment we come into contact with someone new. Sometimes, we judge them without having exchanged a word, or having made eye contact with them.
Exactly what then, are we judging? We’re judging the initial thinking we have about the new person, and that’s all. That thinking has absolutely nothing to do with the person standing in front of us.
When we engage in this sort of cursory judgment, we withdraw or disable the part of our consciousness that enables us to engage at our best. In other words, we disable the love that is our core, our essence. Now we’re playing with half a deck, which is never a good idea.
It was a revelation to me when I discovered just how little my judgments add to the world, because they contribute nothing, and come at a big cost to me. The cost is constant dissatisfaction with the world I see around me.
The judgments each of us make seem accurate and important, but, how much time do you spend questioning the snap judgments you make on a regular, daily basis? It’s that lack of assessing a the truth of a belief that lands us in trouble. It’s awfully easy to believe what our thinking tells us, but when you stop and think of it, does the fact that you happened to think that thought mean it must be true?
It’s ridiculous to believe that everything we happen to think is true.
Snap judgments are at the top of the list of things we think that have no basis in fact. Not only are snap judgments about other humans a terrible, disrespectful way to diminish someone before we see who they are, but they also diminish our sense of who we are. We seem like smaller people, and we walk around with a bitchy, irritable feeling.
Now, when I meet someone new, I’ve discovered something wonderful that I think I was looking for my whole life, without being able to describe it. Rather than being tempted to judge them, I’m much more curious to see who’s really there. With that kind of open-minded, open-hearted curiosity in play, there’s no room for judgment, and I fall in love with them instantly.
Doesn’t that sound better than walking around with a bitchy, irritable feeling?
