On advice, judgement and gossip

It's easy to be giving out advice when it's not you. But we all know that don't we?

When someone comes to you and tells you about their problems, you tell them that they should try doing this or that and it's easy to get caught up in someone else's problem. It's easy to get frustrated with them because the solution seems just so obvious and they're not willing to take the step.

Suddenly, it's you who's facing a problem and you're not able to do what seems obvious to everyone else .

'But it's different for me', you say. 'This problem is not the same as that. If I were in their situation I would have been able to solve it.'

Maybe you would have, but you're not in their situation, and they aren't in yours. You are not them and they are not you.

And when someone judges you for it, you feel like screaming, 'You don't know anything about me! Stop judging me!' Not realising that when it was them that you were judging, they would have felt the same way.

It's so easy giving advice when you are doing well off, when you are temporarily problem free and things are going your way. But when you're in trouble, everything you said before seems silly and laughable. You understand. You tell yourself, 'Never again am I treating another person lightly.' But when we go back to a state of normalcy, we forget what it felt like, we feel invincible once again.

Giving advice is well and good, people want to see their problem from different perspectives. But what they do with that advice is up to them. When people come to you with their problems, don't get involved. Help them, give advice to them but don't expect them to follow it, don't feel attacked when they don't and don't rub it in their faces if they come to you for support.

Empathy. The ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes.

It's sounds so easy and we all think we're doing it. But it's not easy and we're not all doing it. It doesn't matter if you have feet of the same size, because the other person's shoes are worn with use and have moulded around their feet, so no matter what, your feet just won't fit like theirs.

What I'm trying to say is, it's easy to look at a person in black and white and judge them. But the decisions people make have the weight of history and memories and experiences. The filter through which every person looks at the world is different from our own. They've been brought up by different people, in different environments and faced different circumstances.

We all judge, that's human nature. We judge suicidal people, drug addicts and obese people. We judge the choices people make with their education, their jobs, their marriage and their family life. We say, 'Why doesn't she just exercise? Why doesn't he just study harder? Why can't she just stop taking drugs?' as if it's as easy as that: think it and do it. But it's not as easy as that.

We judge, and instead of keeping those judgements to ourselves, we voice it. We talk and discuss and shun.

Words hurt. We throw them around so easily and it costs us nothing to use but when you are on the receiving end, you realise that they are worth everything. Because once you give it, you can never take it back.

We may have different levels of baseline happiness, different thresholds for irritability, different amounts of will power, but we are all same in the way we hurt. The choices people make may be different, but the pain they feel is the same.

It's easy to judge but it's not hard to keep it to yourself. It doesn't matter if you can't understand the choices that someone made, but that does not give you licence to hurt. Gossiping is fun but not so much when you are the subject.

So, let's try not to discuss people, let's try not to involve ourselves in other people's problems and let's try to be a little more accepting. It's okay if we can't spread happiness, let's at least curb the hurt.