Not understanding someone = a spiritual lesson on its way?

Every once in a while I see somone in a complicated situation and I think to myself "How did they let things get that way?" I wonder why they didn't they do X or Y or Z as it is so obvious that that is what is necessary. I just don't understand them. Often I shake my head, or think to myself in one form or another "I would have done things differently" which is a subtle or not-so-subtle way of considering myself smarter than another.

Something has happened though recently. Or rather I have started to notice something recently that looks like a pattern emerging. I have a feeling that every time I "don't understand someone" I condemn myself to understanding that person sooner or later. Learning, any form of learning, comes from reaching understanding concerning something which was formerly not understood. Spiritual learning, I have a feeling, comes from understanding humanity in all its forms. Sometimes I think that maybe we are God's Little Learners and that our growing understanding of human nature contributes to God's.

Once I hit on this idea I started to realize the long list of non-understandings that I have condemned myself to understand. Probably the majority of the list comes from our parents. "I don't understand how my parents could..." could be the beginning of many, many sentences.

Some things are silly in perspective but nevertheless there they are. I couldn't understand how my parents could be addicted to coffee. Or how they could drink coffee on a hot summer day. Now I do. I could not understand how my father could be addicted to smoking. Now I smoke a cigarette a few times a week and see how addicting it is.

Many more lessons come to me from my students, my colleagues, my friends, the occasional boss... I don't understand how... and then I do. I couldn't understand a certain type of plagiarism, I couldn't understand certain frustrations, I couldn't understand weight-reduction inducing heartbreak, I couldn't understand managing from emergency to emergency... now I do.

Let him without sin cast the first stone. Whether we have sinned or not, the potential is there in all of us. Which makes us all similar. Human. Maybe that is what our mission here is all about, checking off a long list of 'not understandings', a different kind of bucket list than we are accustomed to thinking about.

Now whenever I don't understand someone, it freaks me out a bit.  I realize either I have to figure it out then and there or I am condemning myself to live the experience. Then again, maybe life is all about empathy. I never could understand life ; )