Before We Judge

Invisible Light Sometimes I forget to see when I look. I cast eyes searching for invisible light in you. Light that, sometimes, You also forget to see when you look. We only see what we are supposed to, through a criteria of seeing things, which measures how well we see things like Beauty. Or how others think we should see it. But just as you couldn’t sufficiently describe beauty, I don’t think we could see it because if it is in the eye of the beholder, We must look directly at what is happening in the eye when we’ve beheld. So, in a way, it is not the thing that is beautiful, but the experience of it. Before you judge, try to think of a single word that completely describes you. Every single complexity must be encompassed in this one word which you’ve chosen. May we call you that word? Would you answer to it like it’s your new name? Henry David Thoreau said that “it’s not what you look at that matters, but what you see.” I don’t go to parties often but the last party I attended a guy approached me and the girl I was talking to and said something I couldn’t quite understand. I asked him, “What was that?” and I think he took it the wrong way because he offered to take this outside and fight. The girl I was talking to became fairly annoyed and got a few words in, but before it could get any worse I calmly asked him “Why would we fight?” He looked at me with drunken confusion as I told him, “we are friends, man. I wouldn’t fight you.” I didn’t really know him but he responded, “you’re right, man, I’m sorry.” After he was eventually pulled away by his friend to do something else at the party, the girl asked me how did I respond like that when it was kind of pissing her off. I told her that it was like looking into a reflection, and that I knew he didn’t really want to fight me. I saw myself and didn’t get mad because I recognized the frustration, the incoherent drunken reasoning, the creation of problems where there were none. When we judge, a thousand mirrors are held up and we can see ourselves everywhere we look, and since it is “out there,” we can point to it and say “there it is.” However, if we physically stand in front of a mirror we wouldn’t argue that the flaws we see in the reflection are not ours at all but in the mirror itself. We only see what we’ve prepared ourselves to see. It’s this self-fulfilling prophecy and form of confirmation bias. Perhaps that drunk guy really does want to hurt someone and so he looked in me to find that same longing, to see if I’d mirror him. Instead, I wanted to show him the reflection I saw, a light that he may not be observing. I could pass judgment on him and say he’s just another drunk guy, but it really is so much more complex than that. I could be cliché and say don’t judge a book by its cover; the cliché holds true.