In imperfection lies perfection.
I know you want everyone to think the way you do, see the way you do, live the way you do, and yet that would not make you happy either. You would soon enough get tired of everyone’s being just like you. You would ask for variety. You would ask for what you now call imperfection, and you would know that all personalities, no matter how different from yours, can give you joy just the same. You would then be glad that there are such divergent styles of living in the world, and you would welcome them. You would no longer be cross because someone has other ideas than yours and dresses differently and whose love life may be different from yours.
The time will come when you will give up judgments. Judgments make differences intolerable. The differences are only differences. Your thinking of them makes them intolerable.
There is a tendency to attribute your dissatisfaction to others, as though they are responsible for your feeling out of sorts.
When you are feeling strong in happiness, the same speech or actions that bother you one day, simply don’t on a happy day. When you are feeling happy, and you find life wonderful, there is little that can interrupt your happiness. You are simply too happy. You are feeling so good within yourself that just about anything else rolls away like water off your back. You will experience more and more that habits that may be annoying to you now just won’t have the power to disturb you. Soon you will be too integrated to let little things like that dissuade you from happiness.
All happiness is within you. All dissatisfaction is as well. It is important for you to know that the world does not have to change in order for you to be happy. The world is changing every minute as it is. You can change a little too.
Just about everyone thinks he knows better than everyone else. You are not the only one. Live your life, and still learn from others. The main thing to learn, beloveds, is to take hands off others’ lives. This is more than “live and let live.” It is not dismissing others’ lives and ways of living. It is also understanding, sometimes embracing, if not for you, for them.
And whether you embrace another’s life style or not, you do not have to dishonor it.
Customs, beloveds, are only customs. The fact is that judgment has been a great and honored custom. You have even felt proud of your judgments, as if they make you better than someone else. It is for you to know that everyone has his place on the Earth you inhabit and is entitled to live as he does live. No one has to agree with you, dear ones. You don’t have to agree with anyone either.
In terms of judgment, you may well say that there are people who do wrong things, like murder, like cheat, like steal, break all the commandments you’ve learned to be good and true. You do not have to support these mis-actions. You also don’t have to feel high and mighty because you don’t. Those who use stealth and murder and make unkindness and selfishness a way of life learned other commandments than you, beloveds. Something in life taught them this, and they learned just as you learned. It was a choice, and yet you and they were taught, and you and they learned and made choices. Perhaps they weren’t taught and they themselves thought up a way to ensure their unhappiness. Perhaps it was all their idea. In any case, they made their decisions, as you have made yours. They unlearned love. And now you are learning to love, and leave the unkindness of judgment behind.