Starting the day off with coffee with a wise friend.
We are both learning, many of us seem to be learning, that ongoing, focus on "the other" - parents, partner, kids, friends, the universe - allows us to take the focus off our ego.
It's painful, this readjustment to what's inside us that needs change, not what's outside us.
Blaming what is outside us allows so much less pain. We feel proud, justified, absolved. It's intoxicating. It's empty. It leads nowhere healthy.
Ego-awareness requires time. Patience. Self-love (oddly enough). Humility.
In addition to all that, it requires a willingness to accept the choices others have made.
I do and will always have people in my life that have or will make decisions I think won't be healthy for them, in the long run. Sometimes those decisions even negatively affect me.
My job is to not be in constant critique of them. My job, if I maintain a relationship, is to understand all of our shared human experience, to extend grace and enjoy the relationship for what it is, not what I wish it was. In that, I usually have good boundaries as well and all my relationships are slightly different than others for that reason.
Sometimes, choices people make are truly disastrous, and sometimes relationships end. Mostly though, I find, people do odd and annoying things, things I also do, even though I might find them mostly understandable.
It all comes back around.
I have found the less intolerant I am, the more fussy and picky I am about myself and others, the fewer people I seem to have around me. Who wants to be around that? That energy is toxic. I'm toxic.