I read another quote last week. It was in a book called, “A Guide to the Perplexed’ by Maimonides, a famous Jewish theologian in Renaissance Spain. In his book, Maimonides claims that, “... the existing form of things proves nothing at all because it is merely one of the various phases of the thing,...” In other words, at what phase of its life do we define the appearance of a tree? Of a person? Or someone’s virtue?
How many times do we, in our pride and arrogance, jump to conclusions over an action, or judge a person solely by their immediate apparent effects and appearances? The fruit we see today of the actions that seemed so right and civilised yesterday puts us to shame, and so will the actions of today if we are fortunate to see them after their maturation and fruition. How many times are we enthralled by that beautiful blond-hair-blue-eyed innocent looking child to only discover an awful side of his persona as soon as he turns two or three, let alone 12 …! How many times have we negatively judged this teenager only to later discover in him a very responsible mature adult? How many times have we judged someone and defined their character by one action that displeased us? How many time have we judged someone by standards that we were later to change? Due to our inability to objectiveness, maybe we should leave the business of judging people and their actions altogether to another more competent Authority. And if we are to judge, maybe we should content ourselves with judging others with the same compassionate, giving-the-benefit-of-the-doubt measuring rod that we would want to be used in judging us. Maybe that way, we’ll end up with more friends than enemies!
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