By Nate Fisher

Anthony Johnson often steeples his fingers, leans back, and sinks into a powerful concentration that reminds us of CEOs making decisions at large, extravagant desks when responding to questions.

“I’d probably get rid of all the judgement,” he says when asked what he’d do to change our condition in the world. “I don’t think people should judge other people’s life decisions if it doesn’t affect them.”

This is the world that Anthony, currently a sophomore at Meridian High School, wants to live in and share with his family and friends: a place where judgment takes a backseat to empathy and understanding.

He presses his palms together as if to say a silent prayer for his imagined world to come into being. What will he be doing in 10 years? “It depends on what happens tomorrow,” he says, cracking a smile. “I just take my life day by day.” There’s no hurry; Whatever ideal future is out there, free of judgment, Anthony will see it when he gets there.

For most, especially later in life, losing your zen is easy. Patience is the first thing to go in the theater of our days. Blame the digital bombardment of information from targeted ads and algorithms, but the result is the same: we’re often locked into our empty echo chambers, too anxious to answer our own questions, too frantic not to fill every moment with “clicks” and “likes.” For some, scapegoating the devices in our pockets may be an excuse to act out. However, Anthony is an avid mobile gamer, and his deep focus and appreciation for the “today-ness” of things aren’t lost.

Anthony steeples his fingers again. We’ve asked him to weigh in on another big issue, bullying, which is the net result of the judgmental attitudes he opposes. His answer isn’t sugarcoated; He doesn’t think there’s a way to stop bullying altogether. “There’s bound to be somebody that’ll have a negative mindset, negative enough to talk about somebody else,” he says. “Like you looking down on somebody’s clothes. I don’t understand why people do that…”

While he lives the truth in front of him, no matter how uncomfortable, don’t think for a second that he doesn’t have ideas on how to reach a future free of judgment: “If you’re more fortunate than somebody, then you should be nice to that person because you know they don’t have as much money as you or anything.” For Anthony, he’d like to start building that world with a stable job and apartment somewhere around Atlanta. He says there are many things to do there, enough to satisfy his day-at-a-time approach.

He steeples his fingers. Now he’s thinking about the question from a different angle. He sits with the problem like an old friend and takes his time catching up with it. Now we know what Anthony means when he tells us that he’s always been good at math. Each variable needs to be examined with great care and unshakable patience, or the entire equation falls apart. “Money doesn’t even really matter,” he says as an aside and points to the changes happening with the popularity of cryptocurrency and decentralized banking. Anthony sees the writing on the wall, but he doesn’t need to read it all at once.

Those around us often shape our frame of mind, and Anthony tells us that he has his mother to thank for his inspiration. “It’s amazing to me,” he says. “From her being a single parent, because my dad was incarcerated, her being there to support two kids, going to work, finding babysitters; all that.”

To put it bluntly, as he would do himself, Anthony reminds us that getting there and making positive changes requires participation in the time in between. It’s best to think before we speak, to steeple our fingers and listen to the heart of the problem. He says that he’s interested in learning more about animals and their habits: what they eat, where they sleep, and more about their daily life. We would say he’s already on point in knowing what the human animal needs to do to make everyday life more tender, steeped in patience with an acceptance of each moment we have to offer up an answer if we so choose.