You can’t judge the life of others by not living it from within just as you can’t guess the formula of a drink simply by drinking it.
This sentence came to my mind the other day. I was out and about, at a restaurant, and a local patron had ordered his iced Coca Cola, promptly brought to the table by the diligent waiter. I looked at that glass and thought of how many, by now there will be billions, have tasted Coca Cola at least once. Many, many billions will have drunk it tens, hundreds of times and yet none of them, not even those with the most refined palate and black belt in chemistry would be able to decipher the chemical formula of Coca Cola, which is in fact a secret, not even after lots of tastings.
And I thought how this same reasoning, appropriately reshaped, could be applied to our lives. No one, not even the person with whom we share most of our lives, will ever be able to fully understand our experience, our choices, for the simple fact that he or she, however close they may be, have seen our life looking at it from beyond. out of our shell.
When we understand this passage, when we realize that we will never have the elements to do it, we learn to stop judging others. You know, my relationship with the judgments that others can make about me has gone through ups and downs. There was a time when I paid attention to it. Then slowly as I matured I learned to give a damn and, I think, I succeeded precisely because I understood that the big problem in judging lies in the fact that those on the outside do not see how certain things are experienced from within, and will never be able to understand them.
I won’t hide from you that, despite the strong armor I’ve learned to equip myself with, even today there are some judgments I hold dear and which, when they’re negative, hurt me: they’re those of the few, very few (I’d say two or three in all) people I care about more than ever, more than my own life. I realize many times that they judge me and that, however close to me, they don’t always share my choices, and when this happens, and when a judgment against me arises from it, I suffer badly.
I think it’s normal but, I also believe, at a certain point we have to learn to accept that “diversity of views” is not a problem but the very salt of our existence, the decisive element that makes us unique. We just need to learn to separate the diversity of views from the judgment of the type “I wouldn’t have done as you did but I don’t judge you for this”, but I understand that for many this is still too big a step to take.
In the meantime, I’ll have to learn to accept these judgments. I will not share them. I will simply understand that it is normal for them to come on me, like the rain on the day you put on a light dress. I know that what I have done and what I will do in life will not always be shared by the people I love. But I am a traveler who has always pointed the bow of his boat in the direction of happiness, and on this journey I have learned to accept storms and storm surges, consoling myself with the starry skies of clear nights, and with the awareness of having a mission to carry in the end… towards myself and what I deserve to live.
