I live in a large New York City apartment building, with lots of people and a fair number of elevators in the lobby.  The other day, I got home and was waiting for an elevator, standing next to a young man who was about 13 years old.  He was almost my height, carrying his skateboard.  Little did I know, as we waited for the elevator, that he was to quickly become an excellent teacher around the theme of judgment.

As the elevator door opened, he immediately walked in front of me to go into the elevator and I followed behind, musing about what would have happened to me as a child had I walked through a door in front of a person older than I.  As the elevator proceeded up to our respective floors, I found myself having a powerful internal conversation about judgment.  In the past, I would have become irritated at what I would have perceived to be the young man's rudeness for walking in front of me.  Now, instead of that internal conversation, I found myself thinking about the fact that he and I come from different cultures, with different assumptions and mores.  I realized that, in his world, he didn't do anything that would be construed as rude, because in his world it's okay to walk ahead of someone who's older than he.

What struck me about the experience is that, by the time the elevator got to my floor, I was free of any judgment of him and curious about the differences in the cultures he and I inhabit.  We live in the same city, speak the same language, walk around on the same streets, and yet we are in different cultures in some significant ways.  I was kind of amazed that I didn't go into any judgment about his behavior, and was relieved to have gotten off the elevator without the wear and tear of the irritation and stress that comes when we judge others and have arguments with them in our heads.

For this week's experiment, I invite you to notice what happens when you substitute curiosity for judgment, or when you have a constructive conversation with yourself about your judgment rather than going with it.  What became my gift to me was the lack of stress and the toll it takes on me when I fall into irritation or self-righteous judgment.  I invite you to notice how it is for you when you allow yourself to move into thoughtful awareness rather than judgment the next time someone does something that's different from how you would have done it.

That doesn't mean to agree with behaviors and ways of being that are abusive, toxic or harmful to you.  There are things people do that we need to judge as something to move away from, or refuse to accept.  What this experiment addresses isn't that kind of situation.  Rather, it focuses on the day to day ways in which we bump into one another's benign differences - those differences that come from family norms, cultural shifts, and belief systems that generate unfamiliar practices and ways of being.

This experiment is an invitation to play with judgment and curiosity, and to notice the differences in your internal experience when you engage one or the other.  As with all the experiments, the opportunity here is to increase your awareness of how you move through your world, and how the choices you make affect the quality of your internal and external experience.