But another big part of my development is to recognize that everyone has their own metric. And that metric is likely not going to be the same as mine. And that’s fine. Most metrics people choose are fine. Even if they’re not the same metrics I would choose for myself. I may view the world through family values, but most people do not. I may view the world through the metric of attractiveness, but most people do not. I may view the world through the metric of freedom and worldliness, but most people do not. I may view the world through the positivity and friendliness, but most people do not. And that’s simply part of the human experience. Accepting that others measure themselves and the world differently than I do is one of the most important steps to consciously choosing the right things for myself. It’s necessary for developing boundaries, deciding who I want to be a part of my journey and who I do not. I may not accept a person’s ideas or behaviors. But I must accept that I cannot change a person’s values for them. Just as we must choose our own measurement by ourselves and for ourselves.
They must do it by themselves and for themselves.
You Be The Judge
Judgement….. such an easy word to say and equally easy to do to ourselves and to others. Judgment is all around us externally whether it’s what we see in entertainment, what we see others do to each other, what we see and just simple things daily through our experience. In John 7, of the User Manual of this Life Experience, states, “judge with right judgment” and not “by appearances” (John 7:14). The meaning of this is that we should judge spiritually within ourselves with love, not worldly.
There are plenty of values worth judgment. I realized that I judge people who are not in sync with my standards. But that is a reflection of who I am. There are traits that I will not tolerate within myself, therefore I do not tolerate them in others. But that is a choice I am making. That is a choice we are all making, whether we realize it or not. And we should make those choices consciously, awakened, and not on auto-pilot or what we were conditioned to believe. It’s why people who think they are not good enough look for all of the ways people around them are not good enough and why people who are lazy in terms, look for all of the ways others cut corners and label them lazy as well. It’s why people that dont invest effort is inline that they assume everybody else won't put the effort in as well. It’s why those who can’t trust are the ones who can’t be trusted.
Many of us adopt our own internal measuring cups not through conscious choice but through the shaming we’re subjected to. I love the quote, “Everyone is either trying to prove or disprove who they were in high school,” because for many of us, our measuring cup is defined by how people viewed us growing up. We develop a fixation in one area of our life experience because it’s the area which we felt people judged us the most. The prom Queen who is afraid to lose her looks as an adult. The kid from the South Side obsessed with becoming rich. The loner who wants to throw the biggest parties. The slacker who wants to prove to everyone how smart he is. A big part of our development is to recognize our own fixation, to recognize how we measure ourselves and consciously choose our metric for ourselves.