judgment
Lately I’ve been thinking about how judgment is something that requires practice. At work, it’s pretty obvious - you can read the rules and someone can give you super clear instructions, but at the end of the day, there is always going to be a fuzzy edge between the “right” and “wrong” choice. It’s so easy to say that someone doesn’t have common sense or has poor judgment, but it makes me wonder if people with common sense or good judgment were actually born with it, or if they were just put into more situations, earlier on, where they needed to exercise that muscle.
Even with big life decisions, I look back on them and think that I was so dumb at the time. That I clearly made the wrong choice, or didn’t think enough, or thought too much. That I didn’t judge the situation properly, but in hindsight the right answer is so clear. But then I’m faced with those kinds of situations now, and I feel that same overwhelmingly lost feeling wash over me. Maybe it’s one of those things like not noticing that you’ve grown taller until you outgrow your clothes - that I only notice the situations that are beyond my current judgment abilities, but don’t notice the ones that I’ve come to master. In ten years, maybe I’ll look back on my current situation and think that I made the wrong choices and stayed too long and not long enough. I hope not, but if that does happen, I hope that the decade older version of me will have honed her judgment a little bit more.