Bodies, Judgements, and Quandaries

"If a body catch a body coming through the rye."

Catching a body - making contact with another.  Feeling their presence alongside yours, this is what we want and need.  You, in a field of swaying rye, but alone no longer.

Really, what do you see when you look at somebody? Is somebody just 'some body'?  What do our bodies give away about us, what do they really show about us, what is worth judging someone over, being attached to?  Are people just some body? Where does all the stuff thats contained in our mind - our memories, desires, and histories, reside?  Are our bodies the ultimate vehicle for our existence?  Could it be different?  Could we not have physical bodies?  Whats so attractive about the physical body, then?  What of when it  gets ugly, and when it gets old and breaks, or diseased and harmed.  Whats our relationship to our bodies and to other people's bodies?  Whats our continual judgement of our bodies based on, when body characteristics are not something anyone chose?  What of when we dislike our bodies?

To start, some facts about bodies:

The only thing you can see is the present moment.  The body is a material object, and it is 3-d and has space.  The only thing you can see is how it presently appears.  You know someone's general age by looking at them. 

The only thing you can do is make judgements.  I know of no way to simply discern someone's bodies without making judgements.  There is no way in which I could see a body and not associate it into terms of beauty and ugliness. 

Think of all those people you see daily who you will never know.  At first glance, you take them in.  You immediately make a form of judgement; are they friendly, nice people?  Are they chill?  Do they look angry? Would they be your friend?

You derive these judgements from their bodies, and at first, everybody is a new body.  Every person is this walking creature, and I judge from my eyes what I see. 

This has been bothering me for ages that I don't know what to think when I look at a person.  Their body, their image seems to never correspond well to who they in fact are.  For example, I tend to see people in suits and think that they are uptight.  I look at little skinny Asian women and think they are sort of foreign and not friendly, with clanging temperaments. 


But whats worse are their bodies - that I make these snap judgements on people's faces and height.  I tall person I see as more confident.  A black person as more - black.  A beautiful person as stuck up.

It becomes less important to judge people after the first time you've met.  You know them, you are used to them, and you fully accept them as the body that you are percieving.  Anyone's personality and image is wrapped up in their body, but you cease to notice your initial snap judgement of the body after its been multiple times of seeing them.  Then, your idea of the person becomes a stereotype of their body.  But you are aware of their personality mixing into the image and that differentiating how you think of each person.


When you look at somebody, you have no way of knowing anything about them.  Their face, their body, even their sense of style tell you nothing about this persons history.  You look at this face, this material object.  But you have no way of knowing the utter amount of history that the body and mind contains.  One look at a person, zero insight into their past - into loves, abuses, struggles, triumphs, hurts, passions, pains.  You don't know what they used to look like, either - if they used to have dreads, or long or short hair or facial hair, fat or skinny as a kid.  All you can see is where someone is presently at. 

To me this is a massive discrepancy.  How can the body, the only vehicle we have to see others through and percieve our own existence, be so mysterious?  Really, you can only see someone's skin color and guess their family origin when you look at someone.

The problem is, I'm learning over and over and over that my snap judgements are bullshit.  My judgements that look at someone's face and body are so inconsistent with the person's actual behavior and sense of self worth.  I know this because I keep on looking at therapist's images in trying to pick one, and they always come out so different from the therapist's acutal personality.  I thought Jennie would be mean and she's so friendly.  And I thought Debbie would be warmer but she can be lacking.  And Susie, I won't say it, but I did misjudge.
And lastly, we do treat people based on their current outward appearance.  What are homeless people?  We seem to forget they ever had the dignity of being someone who lived in a house and had a family and relationships.  All I see is the current person.

Can a homeless person walk into a coffee shop?  Take up the perfect environment - the pleasantness of furnishings, the coffee aroma, the air temperature that everyone longs for - AC when its sweltering out, heat when its freezing.  If I was homeless, I would want to bum at a coffee shop.   I don't do it much, but I have bummed at a coffee shop looking for internet.  If I have every right to, what about a homeless person? What is it about being smelly and unnatractive (they would scare off customers) that makes us have to put up barriers?  There are no signs sayign 'no homeless people allowed'.  What would happen if someone walked in?  Would they be escorted out?  Would people find it unfair that they bring in their troubles and smells?  Or would people be sympathetic?  I'm not sympathetic, if I was I'd be giving money out to bums.  Lastly, Edward gave out a dollar to a bum and he has no money, and I'm very consumed with guilt over this actions at my clinging to my valuables.

Post ending:  You feel that you are an ant walking across an art painting of a natural scene.  The ant is so small within the landscape that it only sees huge mountains and valleys.  But in fact, you are the art.