Watching your karma

I am home. I am home with every member of my family, in the same room. This is a little more than I can take. One-on-one with each family member, I seem to be able to just notice, to just observe, to even watch with fondness as I see the very same things about myself that I'm not so fond of, being played out right in front of my own eyes.
But when all of us are in a room together, it's almost unmanageable. This dynamic is colliding with that dynamic. What I can tolerate and give feedback on with one person, is not accepted by another person. How I interact with that person, doesn't fly with the other person. And then, in the middle of all of this, is the source of all our habits- our great conditioner- continuing to do what they have always done.
I watch this, I see the very behavior that all three of us have adopted, perpetuated, and manifested in our own way, and I am overwhelmed. It's still going. It's who we are. It's right there in this very person and we are little manifestations of it.

I know that I am supposed to have compassion for this, I know that I am supposed to just notice this, as neither good nor bad. I know that I'm supposed to just be curious about this, to have it inform my awareness of myself. But to see it, in this person, to see it still going is just too much.
So I lean my head against the wall, sigh, and just watch it. I watch it in this person. I recall myself doing a version of it 10 minutes prior, and then I see another family member doing it even as I am sitting there.
"Oh well," I think. "It's here to stay."
And then I laugh at this situation, because really, it isn't that bad.

And it isn't. This behavior that I am witnessing isn't actually a "bad" behavior at all: it's a propensity to help, to want to fix things, and to do these things without any interaction with others- to silently make things better. But underneath these actions is an assumption that we know better. There is also an attempt to control, a belief that we actually can make things better. And the silence, the behind-the-scenes helping which was always presented to me as some sort of valor or selflessness or serving of others looks to me, now, as another attempt at control- a fear of intimacy, a fear of rejection. an unwillingness to ask someone if they need help, to actually work with someone to solve things, to enter into the uncertainty of an equal relationship: actual intimacy.
Maybe that isn't what this behavior is. Maybe that's just what I think this behavior is. Regardless, it's still hard for me to see.

So I just sit there, not really having enough distance from it to see it objectively, not really getting caught up in it either, but certainly not looking at it with loving kindness or compassion.

For the rest of the afternoon, I see it in each of us and in myself. It feels inescapable, like we are all connected to it in some sort of cat's cradle web. But for now, it doesn't feel so binding or trapping or constricting, it just kind of is. I'm a part of it and so are they. We appear to be connected by it, like we all came from the same harvest or something, and so we are equally created and held by it. Maybe we will be free of it some day, though I kind of think we won't, and I don't know that we even need to. I guess I'm just seeing it, seeing that we all are in it, not that one of us handed it down to the rest of us and is now free of it.
And I guess that though it frustrates me to see that we all still carry it in us, that we continue to manifest it in what feels like all of our actions, it is something that we actuallly share, that connects us, that sort of makes us equals in this attempt to naviagte our way through life.