About judgment.....

When I took the train back from Manhattan tonight this 6’2 tall skinny girl with a purple hat and yellow high heels took the subway with me. After we entered the train she walked down the isle to find a spot to sit down. When she passed the other passengers they looked at her with disgust, rejection, almost with hate. That was especially prominent with the male passengers.

Why? Because the girl was very obviously really a guy wearing women’s clothing. His way of expressing himself collided with the ideas we have how a man behaves. And right away there is judgment even in a city that is as open minded as New York. So he likes to wear women’s cloths and to act like a woman? What is really wrong with that? That goes back to our programming. Even as children we could not be who we are. I still hear my parents say, “Only girls do that”. They told me how I have to behave since I am a guy. And the same probably happened to the guys who were horrified with this girl in the train because he/she is doing the opposite of what they were told to do. Their parents would be shocked and they are as shocked as their parents would be seeing what they are seeing right in front of them.

But who came up with the ideas how we have to behave? Our parents? They learned from their parents. And they learned from their parents and so on and so forth. We are living the past. And we do not question the beliefs we have. I am a man; I have to act this way. If I would be a woman many things would be different. But all of this is of course only an example for our belief systems. Did we come up with any of what we consider right or wrong  on our own?

When we look at that deeply we will realize that almost all we believe and accept as a fact was taught to us to be that way. Most of it we never question. Why do I believe this or that? Asking question is uncomfortable. We asked a lot of questions as children and got many answers from people who had no idea what they were talking about. But we believed every single answer especially from our parents who were like gods to us. As children we believed they knew all the secrets of the universe. At a certain point we thought we had all the answers. Our beliefs settled in and we stopped to ask questions. Why ask questions when you know what the world is all about!?

But maybe the world is not what we think it is, we are not what we think we are and our ideas about life are completely wrong. We are afraid to ask questions, we do not want to find out that what we believe might be wrong. We want to hang on to these beliefs because we think that is what makes our life’s safe. What happens if everybody would start to doubt what we were told to believe? It would definitely shake things up. Is money happiness? Why work? Does marriage work? Why do things we do not want to do?

Sometimes it feels that asking these questions is like leaning on subway doors. It is dangerous because you never know when they might open. This is why we don’t do it. In life we make sure that we do not ask fundamental questions because suddenly we might get an answer that changes our life and the life’s of people around us. Change is the unknown and things we do not know always seem dangerous.

As you by now probably expect I love to lean on subway doors and do it as often as possible.  I also love to ask uncomfortable questions that rock the boat. Doing that might help me and others to grow and one day see a skinny girl with a purple hat and yellow high heels in the subway that is really a guy and have no second thought about it.

"The Train". R Train at 42nd Street Times Square Manhattan/New York 01-22-08 at 08:08 PM.

 

Please check out my website at carstenfleck.com