Jugement

Judgment is the quiet blade we all carry.
It begins as survival: the mind sorting friend from foe, safe from poison, true from false. A child touches fire once and judges it forever. That is necessary, even noble. Without it, we stumble blind through the world.
But the blade dulls or sharpens with use. Somewhere along the way, most of us stop judging situations and start judging souls. We trade “this hurts” for “you are bad.” We trade “that didn’t work” for “you are worthless.” The same faculty that once protected us begins to carve up people instead of problems.
The strangest part is how invisible it becomes. We feel righteous, even loving, while we do it. We call it discernment, standards, honesty, “just saying what everyone’s thinking.” We dress judgment in a thousand costumes so we never have to look at its face. Meanwhile the person on the receiving end feels the cut and learns, too late, that love often comes with a blade attached.
There is a rarer kind of judgment (clear, calm, and merciless only toward ideas and actions, never toward the trembling human beneath them). It asks: What actually happened? What can be learned? How do we repair or prevent? It refuses the cheap dopamine of moral superiority. This judgment heals more than it wounds, because it remembers that everyone standing in front of it is, at some hour of some day, a frightened child who once touched fire and is still trying to make sense of the burn.
Most of us swing between these two modes our whole lives: the lazy judge who condemns, and the reluctant one who forgives too much out of fear of becoming the first. Few of us learn to put the blade down entirely and simply see.
I catch myself judging someone and pause. Whose pain am I trying not to feel right now? What part of myself am I disowning by making them small? The moment I can name it, the blade lowers, just an inch. Some days that inch is everything.
Judgment is human. Mercy is divine. The trick is remembering we’re allowed to practice both, but only one of them actually makes us more alive.