As Professor Higgins says in ‘My Fair Lady, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ That is a sexist version of what so many wish, that the people they deal with would be different than they are; less annoying, less hard to understand, less odd in the way they do things.

How often is that our first reaction because it is so much easier to desire that than to actually figure out, and implement, how we can change instead.

Not just because we have areas we would like to change, but also so we have a better reaction to those around us. So everyone else isn’t an annoyance, but is just another person to try to understand, like we hope they would try to understand us.

Drawing and commentary © Marty Coleman

“Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” –  Thomas A’Kempis, 1380-1471, German Priest and Theologian