Life is high maintenance, so just stop judging.

Stefanie 2022-09-19 20:38:01

The two most important attitudes I learned from the 8-week mindfulness meditation class MBSR recently were: focus on the present moment and don't judge. And watching the show, it's like the instructor is vividly teaching you how to practice both.

There is a lot of diversity in the show, and many of the characters successfully evoke my emotions: E01's muscular guy thinks of the big guy who bullied me in class when he was a kid; E04's Chinese parents think of their family conflicts; E05's selfie The girl thought of the extremely self-centered passerby who had offended me. These emotions made me want to criticize, to demonstrate the irrationality of their behavior, to express my disgust, and to attack them.

But the real attraction of the show is that it doesn't read too much. I expect the director to express his attitude to deny or affirm their behavior, but the only way for the director to answer is to leave blank. The disappointment of this expectation made me start to reflect on whether my desire for evaluation was meaningful.

Conflict and pain are all things that have happened to me. Even if they were proven wrong and stupid, how could it be possible to change the fact that it had happened? On the contrary, the process of making an evaluation every time is a process of reawakening unpleasant memories, which repeatedly makes oneself fall into emotions.

One of the few more impactful scenes in the play is the E05 selfie girl who suddenly collapsed and cried at the end of the story. Before this scene, I had a very disgusting attitude towards her, especially when she was interviewing the protagonist, she deliberately led the topic to the racist part. At the moment when she cried, a very evil thought occurred in my heart: "She is asking for it, this is retribution." - However, the strong scene instantly made me realize my ugliness - facing the same kind of crying , the aggression generated by evaluation actually overwhelms empathy as a human instinct.

Afterwards, I rewatched it with a different mindset. For the behavior of each character in the play, try to just express "I like this" and "I don't like this", feel the emotions carefully, and then gently but firmly "file" them, let them be the past, no longer Experience them repeatedly. This time, the experience of watching the show is much smoother. After watching each episode, with the excellent soundtrack, watching the absurd and funny ending, watching the subtitles slowly drift by, I feel the peace and serenity like in trance.

The Guy gave the characters peace through weed, and the director gave me peace through The Guy.

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