When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
Marcus Aurelius
This Marcus Aurelius quote is borrowed from an article of a great blog site called Brain Pickings. It’s a great reminder on how we should start our day. It’s both spiritual and practical. It sets the tone for us by showing the people and things we may encounter on any given day. The people and things we come across will sometimes pose as challenges. But the important thing is, we should not forget that the people and challenges are in some way reflections of ourselves. The natural thing to do is to accept them for who they are and work with one another. This ultimately will serve us well too.
If I were to summarize it, basically there are three stages. First we should have realistic expectations about what could happen each day. Secondly, recognize and accept the fact that people are not really that different from us. We all share similar characteristics and emotions. People can’t really hurt us. Lastly, the most natural approach is to work with other people, just like how our feet, hands and eyes coordinate with one another.