Every so often, I find it important to remind myself of the following philosophy: “you should give anyone you meet a fair and honest chance…everyone is fighting battles that may or may not be invisible to you.”
As I have written about in the past, I am not an opponent of judgement. I believe and fully stand by the truth. If I am truly a bad person, judge me as such. But judge my wholly, with all of my blemishes and imperfections. Understand where I came from…why I came from…who I came from? Only after answering the hard questions will you find the truth.
In reality, we all take shortcuts to understanding people. We have to! It is impractical to really really get to know everyone you meet. The result, though, is that we all make incomplete and therefore, at least, somewhat inaccurate assumptions about others. Uncovering the truth takes lots of effort and hard work…
I write this essay to remind myself that I should start everyone at 100…not 0. I should give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
Why?
Because everyone is fighting their own battles that are entirely invisible to me. Everyone has demons in their lives – politics, cancer, smoking, family, money, etc. – that keep them up at night. Rich people, poor people – everyone struggles.
There are no competitions here. There is no scale. There is no “this person has it worse.” Everyone loses here. Everyone is battling.
The world is full of some bad bad things.
Also published on Medium.