Day 186: Thinking

Oftentimes when we judge other people we tend to think in terms of "I would never do that. If I were in that situation, I would do this and such." The thing is, we don't know all of the situation. My friend told me that when she moved into her house, the carpet had never been vacuumed. I was stunned. "How could you buy such an expensive house and not take care of the carpet?" I was thinking of course, that I would never do that. But then she told me that the woman she bought it from was a single mom going through a tough time. Ahh. That changed my perception immediately. When going through a crisis, there are many more important things than carpets. In that situation I understood better with details, but sometimes even with details, there are things we can't understand. It is easy to think dispassionately about things when not in the moment. It is easy to forget or not take into account how it feels to be yelled at or our emotional response to physical pain. When these emotional responses are flooding our bodies, we don't respond in the same way we would from just hearing about the incident. So, . . . we can never say, "I would never do that." Because . . . how do we know?