Open your eyes

When you go through life, you will meet a few people you hit off with, and they become your friends. by the same token, you will also bump into people you simply cannot see eye-to-eye with, and you mark them down in you personal blacklist. once they're in that list, you start saying things like this:

"Hey, you know i heard that that guy, XXX..."

"Oh, that guy..."

sound familiar? when things reach that stage,  we have officially forgotten to treat that person as a fellow human being. we begin to associate that person with that particular set of traits that we hate about him, and we forget that that person has his own tears and failures, his disappointments and regrets, his heartaches and breakdowns. like you, he has been bruised and battered by the grinding stone which we call life; can you really bear to add to his burden? if you can, then what makes you so much better than the person you despise?

maybe it is empathy and not forgiveness which is the true answer to peace. not forcing yourself to forgive a person's misgivings, but forcing yourself to see the world through his eyes, and then having mercy come about as a natural conclusion.

sometimes we get so caught up trudging through our own private worlds, cursing over every tree branch that blocks our path, that we forget that our world isn't private at all, that we share our world with everyone else, and that maybe that branch is actually another person reaching out to your. open your eyes and see your world as what it truly is: our world.