Looking for a New Year's Resolution

If you are looking for a new year’s resolution in this year 2018, I could recommend mildness. Mildness is a special type of generosity, and generosity was already our 2017 resolution.

Mildness is also a special type of moderation or moderateness. We deliberately decide not to judge too fast. We decide to be modest in our judgement. There are several reasons for this. First, we know we may also become subject to the judgement of others. If we could only experience the harshness with which we judge others, we would realise we would all fail in our own exam. The only reason we can live with this thought is that we know internally why we fail in the expectations that have been put on us. We forget that others also carry internal reasons why they can’t fulfil the expectations that we have put on them.

I am sometimes totally stupefied by people’s judgement harshness in the social media. It seems as if people feel better about themselves if they can collect likes by judging people very severely. If our society is plagued by stress, it may be an indication that we tend to judge too severely, or at least that our expectations are unfairly high. Perhaps we dream too much or we don’t perceive the difficulties of others sufficiently. Lack of mildness is the largest impediment to good collaboration in teams, between companies and between political parties.

Judgement and lack of mildness is also a hindrance to friendship and love. We tend to believe it becomes more difficult to acquire friends when we get older. This is not true. We have just become too good and too fast at judging people. With a little mildness we can allow more people into our circle of friends. A friend is simply someone for whom you have given up judgement, because you found out his/her qualities were much more useful and interesting. Perhaps we need to practice more in perceiving and mentioning our friends' qualities. This would make much better content for the social media!

This topic can be found on my dutch blog, under the name Nolite Iudicare (don’t judge). If you doubt about the usefulness of a new year’s resolution, you should read the book of life. 

Picture taken at the town of Haarlem, the Netherlands