There is More than Meets the Eye
December 19th, 2007One thing I have always felt uncomfortable with is just how quickly some people like to judge other people. So often people jump to conclusions and judge others unfairly without knowing all the facts, or in some cases, not knowing any of the facts. I personally make it a rule of mine to never judge other people no matter what they may have appeared to do or not do. Due to the nature of the universal law of cause and effect, we always get what we deserve in the long run so there is never any need to judge others.
What has prompted me to write this article is a phone call I received from a mate of mine recently. Not long ago my friend was heading to work one early morning when he was approached by an elderly gentleman who asked him if he could help him retrieve a set of keys he had accidentally dropped into a drain near where my friend had parked his car. My friend told this man he would like to help but he was in a hurry to get to work and he will have to ask somebody else for their help. The man quickly responded that there was no one else around to help him and pleaded for my friends help. My friend apologized telling the man he simply did not have the time to help him find the keys he dropped in the drain and began to walk away.
As my friend walked away, this man verbally abused him using the most profane language you could possibly imagine. After work that day my friend went home and could not stop thinking about what had happened that morning with the old man and decided to give me a call.
Now on the surface it would seem like the right thing to do would be to help this old man find his keys he accidentally dropped down the drain but there is another entirely different side to this story. My friend had been out of work for almost two months and this was his first day at his new job. He had to go through three interviews to get this job in a very competitive field and he certainly did not want to be late on his first day. On top of this, my friend has a wife and two very young daughters as well as a mortgage he has been struggling to pay since he has been out of work.
When you see the other side to this story it makes sense that my friend did not stop to help this old man. He told me he wanted to help the man find his keys since it was very early in the morning and there didn’t appear to be anyone else around but his family must come first and there was no way he could risk being late on his first day at his new job. I told him I would have done the same thing he did under those circumstances and that this is just one of those uncomfortable decisions we must face occasionally in our daily lives.
We all come across difficult decisions and face awkward circumstances during our journey through life and because we will never know all sides to another person’s story it is not our place to judge other people no matter what they seem to have done or not done. On top of this we should not be too hard on ourselves when we are faced with a difficult decision. We can only ever decide on one course of action for any given situation and no one can ever make the right choice every time. We must face the consequences of the choices we make. As long as we do what we feel is the right decision to make in any given moment, what else can we do?
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