I’m 73 and i feel like Holden Caulfield. Observing the world, abashed and apart and dismayed and often disgusted by what I see. Even if I am striving to be non-judgmental! In fact, this striving is what I think about almost all the time. It slaps right up against  judgmental thoughts that flood my brain endlessly. Observing these judgments dispassionately is the key to letting go of them, I’m told by various meditation teachers, self-help authors and gurus. And don’t judge the judgments! Think of them as comments. So I observe the comments, exasperated by how many of them there are. It’s shocking. They’re even worse than my external comments, which once led a co-worker to describe me as “acid rain.” It was and after thirty years still is very painful to acknowledge his poetic precision. I am psychologically astute, but to my sorrow, only with respect to the bad stuff. It took me a long time to realize that there’s more than bad stuff, that I could apply my insight to finding the good. I thought my negative views were unusually clear-sighted. Now I am attempting real transparency, to describe what I see without inserting myself at all, without attributing motives or interpreting. When I lived at the beach and was experiencing a little spiritual growth spurt i attempted to study the Course in Miracles, but gave up after when first lesson: to look at the leg of a table and acknowledge it was without meaning. I tried to get my head around that but couldn’t. “Of course it’s without meaning,” I thought disgustedly, “I never said it had meaning.” Now all these years later I begin to glimmer that I am assigning meaning to everything I see, and my meanings are meaningless…