One fine morning

It was a fine morning. A sunny, warm, and peaceful kind of morning I always praise and love to begin a new day.

I sat on my favorite couch to start working, when I heard a loud noise coming from outside my cozy and beautiful apartment, a residence with beautiful trees surround it and tidy lawn of well-kept groomed grass. A home I newly resided with my husband as our new life in a new place far from home, regarding my husband’s new job in a foreign country, began.

Hearing the kind of noise that was went on and on, I believed that someone was trying to fix or just trying-out his or her motorbike. Whatever the situation of the motorbike might be, it was allowing the deafening voice from the machine filling the quiet surrounding of my home and I believed others too. Even worse, the smell of gasoline from its fumes gradually interfered with the coolness and freshness of my perfect morning.

A bit irritated, I could not find a way to escape from the situation that bothered me much. Being a stranger in a new country with totally different culture and language, I could barely think of any solution to my problem. I only knew (or decided) that there was someone inconsiderate outside my house who insisted to keep his or her machine producing that disturbing smell and noise for prolonged time.

In an effort to avoid my negative thoughts fanning my flame, I finally rose from my couch and decided to at least take a peek through my window to see the perpetrator.

Then I was surprised, not only by what I saw, but to the total embarrassment I felt in my heart. It was not a motor-bike at all; it was a man with his grass-cutting machine, strolling around the lawn of our apartment with his noisy tools, tidying the grass and plants I admire every morning. By doing his job, he letting himself to be exposed by the deafening noise and choking smell of gasoline fumes. He is the one that makes my lawn admirable and tidy, the one that perfects my day and my morning all at once, the one that once out of my hasty and narrow judgment, was being granted as a perpetrator.

I have decided without asking and believed without searching. I leaned only to my own narrow perspectives. In this life, how many times I judge my fellow human being as an ignorant friend, or an inconsiderate mother, or a careless driver just by what I hear or smell? Or judge certain situation in life as bad or rubbish?

Have I risen and looked with the eyes of my heart, or study more carefully, what are the reasons behind all the scenery and persons I catch with merely my physical senses or my own prejudice in a very short time, before deciding what kind of persons they are ? I'm not being fair. I think anyone who is not fair in mind and not in a fair position, has no rights to judge and is not capable to judge. After all, I don't have the whole picture, yet. And I might never have it.

What lessons might exist in a mundane experience? When Jesus looked up at the tree where Zaccheus climbed and waited for Him to be able to see Him, what did Jesus see? Being marginalized in the society, Zaccheus the tax collector was a man with a deep longing in his heart. It has been overlooked by the society who judged him only by what they think he is without any further considerations. Only a heart with a clear conscience out of love and empathy like Jesus has shown us, can give us the fair truth and beauty about our fellows and life experiences.

In my being still, silent, and calm, I own more space, more time, more consideration, and finally more understanding, to see my fellows in all their circumstances with my empathy, with the eyes of my heart, where Jesus dwells, before giving any judgment, at all.

Uti
Milan, around end of 2008