A simple gesture, enough to change the world. An outstretched hand; one of friendship and peace, held out in offering, not in threat of violence. Not turning the other cheek, not retaliating with equal force, but to forgive without forgetting. Never forgetting.

That one crucial change of the norm could change the way one sees the world. The active and the passive weren’t mutually exclusive. We’ve all been told not to judge, but we can never quite stop ourselves. We’ve all been told an eye for an eye is a cruel form of justice, if justice at all.

But what if we stopped looking at the world as being black and white? What if the world was a place of vivid colours as well as dull hues, not the static checker board of merely Good and Evil.

To judge everything but to not judge harshly — to forgive but not to forget. The past forgiven but remembered as a warning, not as a certainty. Nothing is certain after all, except perhaps that all things are by nature uncertain. Not even the past as we know it is set in stone — history is written by the victors, not by the truth.

Be not Judge, Jury and Executioner. Be both cautious Judge and optimistic Jury, and leave the cynical Execution to Necessity.