Only after the fact

We find it all too easy to be haughty, to be disdainful, to speak with a choleric air of arrogance and superiority when we impudently operate by the premise that the people we’re speaking to are intentionally lazy, careless, inattentive, selfish, immoral, or hypocritical. 

But time and time again, once we actually take the time to learn the other person’s story, we regret our contemptuous behavior. It is only after the fact—only after we’ve learned that the person we lambasted for being timorous and cowardly had an incredibly traumatic past, only after we’ve learned that the employee that we shamed for making a mistake on our order has a severe mental disability, only after we’ve learned that the ostensibly irresponsible person that never showed up to our appointment got into a tragic car accident—that we begin to commiserate, that we begin to feel remorse. 

We are shamelessly quick to assign motives and fabricate narratives to swiftly quell our fear of the unknown, to provide us with at least a surface-level explanation for others’ behavior. But why? Why play this inane game vacillating between contempt and remorse when we can just be a little patient, to take a moment to ask the other person why, to wait things out and actually be presented with real evidence of a certain narrative?