[A shorter version of the post below just became my Facebook page’s most popular post. I hope you enjoy it.]
If you can and when you can, give other people the benefit of the doubt.
Everybody you know has the same condition, the human condition.
This means that, at best, they all wrestle with life.
They must struggle to sort out the balance between the influence of the past and the goals of the present, between selfishness and love, between automatic habit and free choice.
In this way, we are all dual, and all of us fail and fall.
The only question is whether we get up again each time.
This is how life-wrestling is “at best,” because some of us don’t bother to wrestle, instead rationalizing mistakes, abdicating responsibility, and blaming others.
Accordingly, our understanding the struggles of others does not require us to live in truly abusive situations or spend our lives in marriages without hope.
Rather, it prompts us, in more grey areas, to hold ourselves accountable also.
Indeed, wrestling can be both frightening and painful.
It just beats the alternatives, such as becoming stuck and stagnant in life.
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