Pet peeves are just judgments in disguise
June 23, 2009 – 7:53 am
After spending a long weekend visiting family in Wisconsin, I woke up thinking about the benefits of travel.
Getting outside of my normal environment always forces me to pay attention to how other people do things, whether I’m aware of it or not.
At first, my inclination was to judge the differences as if my way was automatically better. I caught myself thinking things like, “where’s the bottled soft drinks?” and “how come they don’t recycle?” When I put those two thoughts together I laughed out loud. If they’re not serving canned or bottled drinks there’s very little to recycle, is there?
We humans have a tendency to assume that our way is always better. But thinking like that is a win-lose: if your way is better, than their way must be worse.
Just for today, try to count how many times you compare your way to another’s way. It could be as insidious as getting angry at the way your housemate attaches the toilet paper to the holder – over or under, or the way they leave dishes to do all at one time rather than washing each one as it gets dirty.
Doing these little exercises can make you really aware of how much you judge others and how many things you subconsciously count against them.
The idea is to first become aware of the counters and then to release them.
Happy day,
One Response to “Pet peeves are just judgments in disguise”
Your topic was about Cow’s and Pet pives, but you did not say anything about cows, That was good because they were not cows they were Steer’s,
Van
By Van Atkins on Jun 24, 2009