Whom I judge (and why)

It’s time to step into the chamber of shadows and examine some of my judgements. After all, the world is built on them and so am I. Judgements can be useful as long as we’re aware of them and accept them for what they are - opinions which more often than not are rooted in fear. They often point to an inability to integrate a part of self or to accept that your own reality in no way supersedes somebody else’s reality. 

I judge many people and many things but the judgement that seems appropriate to bring up here, and feels a little difficult to confess to, actually, is that of people my age or slightly younger who’ve never become financially or logistically independent of their parents. The more closely I looked at this judgement the more I realised it has nothing to do with others. I’m simply afraid of all the parts of me that seem dependent on my inner adult, and I don’t always know how to handle them. 

In other words, I’m quite bluntly projecting aspects of myself on the people that I judge. I’m afraid of these aspects of me  coming to light and - God forbid – taking over. (And so if you who are reading this and are in position of some dependency on your parents, rest assured that a judgement coming from me or anyone else is nothing to do with you, it’s merely a mirror of facing something we are afraid to face. And, on top of this, obviously only you can decide whether other people’s judgements amount to anything important in your world).

Taking the judgement analysis further, an interesting question arises. Why am I so afraid of a part of me which is content with pursuing whatever interests me, with independence - financial and other - being secondary to that? And who could I be today if the pursuit of my truth was more important than so-called “standing on my own two feet”, buying a flat, creating a profitable company, etc. I can only imagine that. And I can also only imagine how difficult it has to be for my peers who, for whatever reason, are to a degree dependent on their parents, to be judged as “less than”. Particularly that, from my vantage point, they are reflecting an important shift in society in terms of how we relate to work. At least, what’s been understood by “work” by generations before. As a collective we are starting to realise that perhaps doing work doesn’t have to mean being sucked dry. Investing all of the energy resources at our disposal in order to make the money to be able to, perhaps, one day, invest into our own growth and/or do things that we actually enjoy. (Although a pretty common alternative scenario is spending the money made begrudgingly over years and decades on healing the health damage created or exacerbated during this very time.)  

It’s indeed a radical concept, even in this day and age, but work can, from my experience, become a place of growth; a place where I meet myself, both in my mastery and in my weakness. I believe we don’t have to exhaust ourselves doing something we don’t believe in and/or which gives us no pleasure for eight plus hours a day. This equals three quarters of a lifetime sacrificed in order to engage in our development somewhere else. More and more of us recognise they aren’t prepared to be part of this old paradigm. And so we try something radically different. We run experiments. What if making enough money to get a mortgage wasn’t a key test of so-called “adulthood”. What if we did things we feel intensely drawn to, whether or not they produce a situation where said mortgage is a viable option. Some of us do. And I have respect for this. Respect that quietly hides underneath my fear, which hides underneath my judgement.