You may get the impression that people you meet desire to pick fights or just make your life difficult. They may seem to aim to prevent you from doing what you wish to do. Perhaps they appear suspicious of your choices or strongly disagree with your ideas. Would they be forgetting you also have opinions? To you, these people may be illogical. They seem irrational or inflexible. Their opinions may seem clouded by closed-mindedness, prejudice, resentment, jealousy, ignorance or a lack of desire to understand you. When you judge other people you forget you also judge yourself.

Consider a cultural centre with an older generation of members who speak native languages and desire to preserve and share their national traditions. At the same time, the younger generation doesn't speak the native languages and feels left out or unwelcome at cultural events they don't understand. Imagine a council with mostly older members as well as a few younger members. Where the president and other older members fervently resist change, yet desire young people to be more active in the cultural centre, this may put you in a quandary about what to do.

If you choose to see life not as an endless battle for those unreachable final results, but as an endless series of experiences to learn, then you may ask yourself why people behave as they do.

If you choose to view contention as a teacher, then the reason for encountering disagreeable people becomes clear. A journey is a process to enable you to identify root causes of feelings.

If you choose to ask why people resist your agenda, and ideas you view as necessary and sensible, then you may grow to sense meaning in both individual and collective agendas, and how either one alone is seen as a threat.

If you choose to imagine yourself in the position of contentious people, raise your awareness to their full experience, then you may realize you may fear losing a concrete sense of who you are.

If you choose to empathize with hidden fears, and re-create or refine your vision, then you're more likely to arrive at an acceptable compromise and result in more people embracing change.

If you choose to recognize that a single agenda of self-definition can be served for all, then distinctly different yet, remarkably connected experiences of each person can be embraced.

If you choose to rise above your own temporary amnesia, not be provoked by rigid disagreement, then you will recognize that each position taken is simply an effort to reinforce who we really are.

If you choose to see a given situation from multiple points of view, and present strategies that would appeal widely, then you're likely to discuss possibilities considered meaningful to everyone.