Thursday Thought: Everyone is Doing the Best They Can

A little while after we moved into our house, a million dandelions bloomed in our yard. I had never seen anything like it before. Where we moved from there is a pesticide that makes it so there are hardly any dandelions anywhere, but where we moved to this pesticide was outlawed, and apparently what was available didn’t work very well. There were dandelions all over our yard, all over the city properties, and most everyone else’s properties, too. I decided to go to work and get rid of them. I spent hours and hours picking those dandelions one-by-one.

When I first started, I had picked what seemed like hundreds, but you couldn’t even tell I had worked on it because there were so many left.

This made me think about our lives. We’re all born into different circumstances. Some of us are born into perfectly manicured yards. We’re taught from the very beginning how to keep our yards weed free. It’s easy to look at others who have hundreds of weeds and judge that perhaps they aren’t even trying.

Some of us are born into yards full of weeds, and perhaps we’re never even taught that it’s possible to get rid of the weeds. Or maybe we even like weeds.

When we see what others struggle with, it may seem so easy to us. Why don’t they just… But you never know where someone is coming from, what they started with, what seeds have blown into their yards. I believe everyone is doing the best they can.

I heard Byron Katie say once on a call, “If you had the same thoughts they have, you would do the same thing.”

When you step back, it’s comical how we try to control each other. We’re all just doing our best, and instead of trying to improve ourselves, we try to get others to improve themselves in the way we think they should. We all do it, but being aware is the first step to peace.

Are you stuck in trying to get someone else to change?