Do your actions determine my mercy?
Swerving in and out of traffic, he was obviously a menace. Young, and driving a car he probably shouldn’t have been. High on nothing more than the adrenaline and inexperience of youth (I hope), he seemed to be in a race against reality itself.
At least he seemed to be able to control his car, but the way he was driving left very little margin for error.
I knew that if it went wrong, someone else was probably going to get hurt, and badly.
As he flew by us, my sweet wife uttered a line that she uses more and more on the freeway these days… ‘I hope you get there without hurting anyone’. Usually at this point I’ll follow up with the simple refrain of ‘or yourself’.
Yet today, with this young man acting so recklessly, I found it a struggle to wish upon him the simple kindness that was recognition of his humanity, and of his intrinsic value as a consciousness that can learn and grow…
And I learned a lesson about myself that I really didn’t want to know.
Because in that split second, I realized that I was allowing my judgment of his actions to affect the amount of mercy I was willing to bestow upon him. And yet if I cast my mind back to my days of that age, I could recall times where I had acted in ways that were foolish, in and out of motor vehicles.
If I was going to judge this young man for his actions now, should I hold the same judgment against my actions then…
And would I have been worthy of my own mercy towards myself.
I think it’s a dangerous road we start down when we decide that we should be the arbiters of kindness. The moment we set ourselves up as the oracle of who is worthy of our good intentions, we are immediately adopting the principle that there are those are not.
Once we decide that those kind of people exist, we start judging with the possibility of denying the basic value of another human being, and we suddenly begin to find those who are ‘worthy’ of our callousness and our derision.
By denying another’s intrinsic value, we are saying that their value is not intrinsic at all.
At which point, we start setting criteria of ‘worthiness’ which we apply to others in a manner we are reluctant to apply to ourselves.
Suddenly, the world becomes separated into those whose actions have a claim on our mercy, and those whose behaviors tempt us to see ourselves as better, more worthy, and to shut them out and deny their humanity and possibility.
A temptation into which so many people fall, although there are some who are trying to climb their way out of.
Because if you have the courage to go really deep into your soul, the chances are you’ll see the same darkness in you that you find abhorrent in them. The judgments you hurl at them are probably ones which your actions would have brought forth against yourself in another time, and another place.
It’s a true statement to say that when you have learned to love and forgive yourself, you’ll find within yourself a love and a forgiveness for others.
For how can I learn to treat myself with kindness and not extend that to another.
So as that young man drove off into the distance, I thanked him for the lesson he taught me in the few moments in which his life intersected with mine.
For he showed me that I still have a distance to travel on my journey, and that there are still many lessons to learn.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings