Acceptance of Moral Life

 Moral life is an interesting topic that I have not explored, because I am often afraid that it's not possible to assign a single absolute moral meaning to things. Nor is doing so particularly desirable, because it's often the case that what seems right in one situation is not right in another. How do we deal with judgments that we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing at every moment in life?
   I think it's always important to respect the other's view: in fact, I think this is a moral principle in itself, to try as hard as one can to put aside their own moral judgments and to try to understand things from the others' position. I have to admit that I have not always been very good at this point. For example, whenever someone else is making a judgment regarding how I should conduct myself or what I should be doing, I immediately go to my own judgments ("no, what this person says is definitely not right", or "they shouldn't be telling me how to act"), without getting a sense of where that person is coming from. In this way, I am too defensive about allowing others' moral sense to invade my own. The opposite attitude is not to try to guard oneself at all from the judgments of others: if someone else has an idea that could be useful to me, why not entertain it and try it out? Being more open to suggestions is something I would like to try, but it requires the utmost relaxation: I am open only insofar as the ideas that others have are not a fundamental threat to my true self underneath the opinions I have accumulated about things.
   This "relaxation" however is not to be confused with apathy or a kind of passive resistance to suggestions. For example, a person might "go along" with something not because they truly are willing to try it but to avoid having to face conflict with someone else. This approach of passive resistance is not going to work well, because it ends up making a person feel disengaged and alienated even when they are going through the motions of doing what is "right". A different approach might be to realize that my resistance is only a sign that the other person is a close part of myself that hasn't yet gained full expression or recognition. When I own that part of myself, I am no longer trying to separate from it; I can embrace it as a newly discovered part of my being.