People are different and when they start living in close contact such as in a joint family, the differences tend to become prominent. It is not that people are bad, they just cannot harmonise with each other since each believes his or her own way of life to be right and the only true one. Besides, there is no common goal that can hold them together. There is also a breakdown of the old social order with individuality being the new way of life. All this creates considerable confusion.
These difficulties are there as part of the variety and differentiation of life and those who can adapt will evolve further, while the rest will only lose time with energies wasted in useless quarrels about petty things. The true way of course is to look behind the differences and see the common essence of humanity in everyone with their own struggles and hopes, challenges and difficulties. It is also good to find some common activities through which people can come together in a family household, but these days the bonding is hardly there. But in any case, it helps to understand that people are fragile and vulnerable so that we do not castigate them for being this or that.
Then we can of course limit our interactions with a difficult person to the essential ones while focusing our time and energies on our true goal if we have one. Most issues in our life arise because of the lack of clarity about one’s goal. A clear goal results in so much focus upon it that most other things do not even register as important let alone bother us. In fact, we hardly have any time to notice who is giving us attention and respecting us or not, and everything becomes a stepping stone towards our further progress.
It is also true that we begin to be moulded in the image of the person who occupies too much space in our consciousness. So it is best not to think too much about the person in question, what he or she is and what is not or should be. And instead of trying to understand the difficult person (which in any case is an impossible exercise since every human being has many layers apart from a long unique past and an equally unique future), find our own goal and stay focused on that. All the rest has little or no importance.
