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How to Love A Difficult Family at Christmas Time
A Taoist perspective on family struggles
There are those lucky people who look forward to Christmas with the family. But for many, this is a time rife with conflict, expectations, and a lot of wishing things were different, and more importantly, wishing that our family members were different.
What if this desire to change them is the way of madness? What if there is something fundamentally wrong with our philosophy about how we see others that aggravate already difficult situations?
Perhaps the Taoists have something that can help us.
“If the gentleman measures man by the absolute standard of righteousness, then it is difficult to be a true man. But if he measures by the standard of man, then the better people will have some standard to go by… the superior man does not try to criticize people for what he himself fails in, and he does not put people to shame for what they fail in…
“The superior man goes through his life without any one preconceived course of action or any taboo. He merely decides for the moment what is the right thing to do… The goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue.”
Lin Yutang’s translation of Li Chi, in “The Wisdom of China & India”
