A friend recently told me something about his brother that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
His brother is one of those people who leaves a wake behind him.
Conflict. Hurt feelings. Broken relationships. Illegalities. Messes that other people somehow end up cleaning.
And yet he keeps moving forward—unscathed.
Things work out. Opportunities appear. Consequences that seem inevitable somehow miss his address.
He seems, strangely, lucky.
My friend offered an explanation:
“I think he just forgives himself instantly.”
At first, I thought he might be right.
Then I realized that isn’t forgiveness.
It’s self-exoneration.
Forgiveness requires reality.
I did that. That part belongs to me. What can I repair? What can I learn? Can I let myself go now?
Self-exoneration takes a shortcut.
They started it. They’re too sensitive. That’s their problem.
Next.
And that shortcut may explain some of the luck.
While one person spends three days metabolizing guilt, grief, worry around a conversation that ended Tuesday, the self-exonerating person rolls the dice again.
Another ask. Another opportunity. Another relationship. Another attempt.
Maybe some people don’t get better dice.
Maybe they just roll them more often.
And frequently, someone else absorbs the consequence for them. A spouse accommodates. A sibling cleans up. An employee compensates. A family restores equilibrium.
The consequence didn’t disappear.
It moved.
It reminds me of an inside joke I used to have about karma.
Before I seriously studied yoga, I used to joke that perhaps the ancients came up with karma so that good people could sleep better at night.
Don’t worry. The universe will eventually get him.
Maybe not today. Maybe not in this lifetime. But eventually that invoice is coming.
Except karma, in its deeper meaning, isn’t simply a cosmic punishment system. It is much closer to action and consequence—to what our actions set into motion.
And perhaps waiting for the universe to identify the bad humans misses the more useful question entirely:
How do I know whom I should move toward?
We love categories.
Good person. Bad person. Safe person. Toxic person. Narcissist. Empath. High vibration. Low vibration.
Unfortunately, most humans refuse to cooperate.
Most people are neither saints nor villains.
They’re mixed signal.
They love deeply and defend fiercely. They can be extraordinarily generous and carry enormous resentment. They can possess tremendous capacity for unconditional love while still reinforcing old echo chambers of fear, grievance, certainty, judgment and shame.
That’s most of us.
And perhaps that’s why reading another human can be so difficult.
Sometimes what you’re sensing isn’t a clean signal.
It’s signal traveling through static.
You can genuinely like someone and feel unsettled around them. You can recognize someone’s goodness and still notice yourself bracing. You can love someone and consistently leave their presence exhausted.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your intuition failed.
Maybe your intuition read the mixture correctly.
We tell people to trust their gut.
I agree.
But there is a prerequisite.
An unregulated gut isn’t necessarily an oracle. It may be an archive.
Fear can feel like intuition.
Familiarity can feel like safety.
Attraction can feel like resonance.
An old wound can recognize another old wound and call the recognition chemistry.
So before becoming better at reading everyone else, perhaps we need to become quieter inside ourselves.
Before you read the room, quiet the instrument doing the reading.
This is something I think animals still remember.
A dog doesn’t need someone’s résumé. It doesn’t know their title, accomplishments, politics or carefully constructed explanation of themselves.
It encounters the organism.
And responds.
I believe humans have this capacity too.
Our nervous systems encounter other nervous systems. Intentions matter. State matters. Presence matters.
We feel one another.
But somewhere along the way, many of us became better at explaining away the signal than listening to it.
We haven’t lost the instrument. We’ve forgotten its baseline.
That’s why I increasingly value something even simpler than meditation:
Quiet stillness.
No achievement. No requirement to empty your mind.
Put the body somewhere it doesn’t have to work very hard. Legs up the wall. A supported position on the floor. Stand balanced in Mountain Pose with your feet grounded, knees soft, spine tall and shoulders relaxed.
Then breathe.
Or wrap one arm around yourself, place the opposite hand beneath the armpit and simply hold your own body for a moment.
Your mind may race.
Let it.
You’re not training your mind to perform stillness.
You’re reminding your nervous system what the absence of vigilance feels like.
Do it again tomorrow.
And again.
This is signal training.
Because once you remember quiet, noise becomes easier to recognize.
Something begins to change. You become less interested in immediately deciding what everything means. You become more aware. More curious. You start wearing what I think of as the clothing of the Witness.
And instead of saying:
I don’t like this person, therefore something must be wrong with them.
You notice:
Something in me changes around this person.
Interesting.
Do I tighten, perform, or suddenly start explaining myself?
Does my breathing change?
Do their words and actions agree?
And perhaps most revealingly:
Who carries the consequences of their behavior?
Truly destructive people tend to leave patterns.
Other people are constantly recovering from them. Cleaning up. Explaining. Walking on eggshells. Making exceptions. Absorbing consequences.
You don’t need to diagnose them.
You don’t need to hate them.
You don’t even need to decide whether they’re a bad human.
The pattern is enough.
Step out of its way.
But those may actually be the easier signals to read.
The harder—and far more common—question is what to do with everyone in between.
Because most people aren’t leaving destruction in their wake. They’re carrying a mixture.
There is love there, but also fear.
Generosity, but also unresolved grief.
An open heart still speaking through old echo chambers.
Signal traveling through static.
That’s the enormous middle.
And perhaps that’s where discernment matters most.
The purpose of becoming more regulated isn’t to turn yourself into a human lie detector. It’s to become quiet enough inside yourself to recognize what happens when you encounter someone else.
Do I remain open?
Do I begin to brace?
Can I be fully myself here?
Does this person take responsibility when they’re wrong?
Can we repair?
Does being around them leave me clearer—or carrying something that wasn’t mine before?
None of those questions requires a verdict on whether someone is a good human.
You don’t have to condemn someone to create distance. You don’t have to prove they’re bad to recognize that a pattern isn’t healthy for you. And you don’t have to turn every uncomfortable sensation into evidence of danger.
You notice.
You stay curious.
You watch what repeats.
And as the static inside you becomes quieter, you learn to trust the signal beneath it.
I keep thinking about murmurations.
Thousands of birds sweep across the sky as though they are one organism. No bird has the blueprint. No bird controls the flock.
Each senses what is near it.
Adjusts.
Moves.
Maybe healthier human systems form the same way.
Not because we finally agree on who the good people and bad people are.
But because enough of us become quiet enough to recognize where we can remain open—and wise enough to move when we cannot.
We begin moving toward people with whom we can breathe.
People who can be wrong.
People who can repair.
People who don’t require us to abandon ourselves in order to remain connected.
And away from patterns that repeatedly ask us to brace, shrink, perform, defend or recover.
No hatred required.
No diagnosis.
No cosmic accounting department.
Just clearer signal.
And movement.
Don’t sort humanity into good and bad.
Learn what signals you want to move toward—and what patterns you no longer need to stand inside.
Maybe our nervous systems have always known how.
We haven’t lost the instrument.
We’ve forgotten its baseline.
And perhaps the way back is simply to become quiet enough to hear it again.
Leave a Reply