Before I forget… by Gent H Larsson

The person in front of you is you

Simple truth: everything has a reason for being exactly how and what it is. Most of the times, though, we are blinded by ourselves and our involvement enough, not to see the cause of the effect and think that the cause is simply what came just before what was caused - meaning: if you are blind, maybe you cannot see and therefore maybe you should not take it upon yourself to be the jury of your fellow human beings?

It is far too easy to not listen to others. Sometimes our emotions blind us and we strike out at the person before us. It is, of course, a strike in the dark: a falsely made accusation, if we make it without seeing – or without listening to what it is that is in front of us.

We all speak of things and we speak of them intentionally. Most of the times, anyway. Whatever we speak of comes from somewhere; it does not just show up there in our heads (if we don’t have a mental disorder at the time, but that is an entire different discussion). Part of it comes from within us, but whatever it is, it starts from the outside and we react to it, making something new of it inside ourselves. From there, that will cause new things, new thoughts.

We are not perfect. We are human beings; nothing more and nothing less. The conclusions we make are therefore not perfect. They can be very good and very well thought through, but it does not make them perfect. Why? Because we cannot know everything about everything, that is why.

Do we always understand another human being completely? Do we always understand ourselves completely? There is not even one single human being on this planet that can honestly and rightly say “yes” to those questions. Not one.

Still we judge and condemn.

Be not so swift with your judgement, be loving and try to understand, because whoever you have in front of you, knows as little about things as you do. I do not want to hate and I do not think there are people out there that want to either, not even the insane ones. You can be sure of that whoever you have in front of you thinks the same, even if it is not always so apparent to you, or even to that person. Hate and hateful acts have causes and those causes come from somewhere outside of the people executing the hateful acts.

The need for love, however, and the potential to love, is always within us. Strangely enough, love is sometimes harder to show than hatred and anger. As a little boy I sometimes heard from the adults, that if a boy hit a girl, it could be interpreted as if the boy actually loved the girl. What world is that, where we fear showing love? I refuse accepting that that world is this world. If we all want and need love, how is it that we continue to not see that need and that want in others?

If you act unlovingly towards me, I will try to understand you and I will still love you. I might not want you near me if you continue on that path, but I will still love you – because I know that you are no different from me or anyone else, in the sense that you do not know everything about everything. I will not judge you. I cannot, because to do that, I would have to know everything about you and that is something not even you do.

I am not saying that it is easy, because it is not easy, in fact it is often very, very hard, but if we do not try to stop this blindness, if we do not open our eyes and start to listen, who will and when?

The person in front of you is you - whoever it is and whatever it was that happened.