The other day I heard a quote that stopped me in my tracks. It’s from Mother Teresa who said, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Wow. That quote right? It makes sense to me because when I think about the process of judging, it’s standing apart, removed from. We see that literally in the courtroom as well. Where does the judge sit? Not with the defendant or the prosecutor, and not even level with those parties. At least, that’s what I gather from portrayals on movies and TV.
To judge someone or something, you cannot be with them and love requires presence. Sure, you can love someone and live far away from them, but in that case, presence is not physical, it’s emotional. This goes for our relationship with ourselves as well.
All week I’ve been judging myself for how I feel, wishing I felt differently. Why aren’t I a bubbling ray of sunshine? How come I’m not dancing around my apartment with joy? The New York Times recently published an article that said we’re all languishing. The author Adam Grant says, “Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.” He also said mental health is a spectrum with depression on one end and flourishing on the other. Languishing falls along that spectrum.
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
I agree with Grant, but also I don’t think he’s quite right. Sure, we’re languishing, but really I think he’s describing burnout. According to HelpGuide.org, “Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands.” Um, hi, what would you call life during a pandemic? Usually when people talk about burnout, they associate it with work, but y’all, I think it’s entirely possible to be burnt out by life itself. When going to the grocery store is stressful, when you’re worried about being physically close to friends, when everything you do feels risky, it makes sense to me that would lead to burnout.
The judgment comes in for me because one, I wish I wasn’t burnt out, and two, I’m close to being fully vaccinated so why aren’t I more focused on the joy of that? My temptation is to argue with myself, but that’s not loving. What I need right now is the presence of myself. For me to say to me, “I know you’re burnt out baby. That’s OK. It makes sense. You don’t have to feel any other way than you do right now.” I took a big breath as I expressed that so I know it created relief.
What all of us want is love – love from ourselves and love from others. I can’t do much about how other people view me, but I can do something about how I view myself. And if I want to improve my relationship with myself, that means approaching my moods, my body, my whatever with love and compassion. It means allowing and accepting where I am, how I feel, as if I were talking to a dear friend.
I dream of a world where we realize judgment separates us while love unites us. A world where we remember love requires presence and that means allowing and accepting what is. A world where we work toward treating ourselves with love and without judgment, no matter how we’re feeling.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
This week I felt like a cuckoo bird. Sitting in a room full of boxes in a new place will do that to me. I noticed that because I felt insecure in my living space (i.e., everything was new and disorganized), that also meant my insecurity regarding relationships came up. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m anxious attachment, which in a nutshell means I feel uncertain in my relationships.
That anxiety and sensitivity was on hyperdrive this week as I found myself spinning out over the tiniest things. For instance, I texted my neighbor and when she didn’t respond right away I started thinking the worst: “She doesn’t want to talk to me! I’m bugging her! She regrets having me as her neighbor!” Of course, that wasn’t true and instead she was just busy, but still. When I’m in that anxious state I take everything personally. I try to read people’s minds and make every action, or inaction, of theirs a reflection on me. I want to modulate my behavior in order to maintain a connection with the person.
What I love about this picture is you think it’s just a drop on a leaf but it’s NOT! Kinda like how if you look closer you see things are between God and us.
Talk about making myself crazy, right?
One of the things that helped me so much with this is a quote misattributed to Mother Teresa. It’s a variant or paraphrase of The Paradoxical Commandments by Kent M. Keith, but I like the inaccurate quote better than the original:
“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
Ahhhh. I’m breathing a sigh of relief just reading that again. Whenever I try to curb or modulate my behavior, I’m making it between us, when actually it’s between God and me. When I express my love for another, I’m really expressing my love for God in the form of a person, and it’s not up to me whether the person accepts it or not. That part is out of my hands. And because the universe is infinite and creative, it’s quite likely that if the person I’m expressing affection to rejects it, I’ll receive love from some other person. For God, there is no limit and there is no distinction.
What I’m saying is it doesn’t matter if my neighbor doesn’t text me back right away, or some guy rejects me, because it was never between us. It was between God and me anyway, and the more I shore up my relationship with my higher power, the better off I’ll be. The more that I stop taking things so personally and practice forgiveness, kindness, honesty, and service regardless of how people respond, the happier I will be.
I dream of a world where we we see relationships as an expression between God and ourselves. A world where we show up fully regardless of other people. A world where we value our relationship with ourselves because we understand ultimately everything is between God and us anyway.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.