For many years I tried to be uncritical. The critical person is generally thought of as one who indulges in mere faultfinding and censure. There seemed to be far too much of that in the world already, without adding more. Besides, I felt, the one who metes out criticism is most apt to become the target for criticism.
But until I gained a better understanding of criticism it proved virtually impossible to keep from destructively criticizing others. Even if the impulse to voice criticism could be restrained and critical thoughts dismissed, such impulses and thoughts continued to present themselves.
Gradually it became apparent that to be completely uncritical would require one to be entirely lacking in discrimination. One would scarcely wish to be unable to discriminate between right and wrong or to not discern the relative merits of performance and quality in one's own experience or another's. The conclusion, I decided, must be that there is a constructive criticism, valid and useful, and which must be cultivated because it encourages and heals.
