Between Opinion and Judgment

I was doing some last-minute shopping at the end of the holiday season when I walked into a store with greeters at the door. One of the women was wearing a mask, and she walked me over to the section I was looking for.

Somehow we started talking. She mentioned her illness, which happens to be directly related to an organ transplant a family member of mine just went through, so we found ourselves deep in conversation rather quickly. At one point, she told me about a man who had walked into the store recently, saw her mask, put up his hand with that look on his face, and said, "I can't even talk to you right now with that thing on your face." Then he walked away.

She'd had other encounters like that, but this one was recent and particularly cutting.

That's what judgment looks like in its most obvious form. But even when our intentions are kinder, we walk this fine line between opinion and judgment every single day. When people behave in ways that contradict our values, our egos step in to justify our own identity and choices. I think of it as identity balancing, this constant calibration of who we are in relation to what we see around us.

We blur the line between opinion and reality all the time. We give our opinions more weight by using judgmental language. Instead of saying, "I didn't really connect with that movie," we say, "That movie was awful!" The perception becomes our new story, our new fact, the reality we tell over and over again.

And we use the same judgmental language with ourselves.

"I can't believe I'm such an idiot." "Why am I such a loser at math?" The research is clear about what this does to us. The stress, the depression, the way judgment affects our bodies. And we get a double hit when that judgment is turned inward.

What if we zoomed the lens back out just a little? What if we could remember that these are opinions, perceptions, interpretations, rather than absolute truths?

What if we could give grace, both to other people and to ourselves?