18.09.2026
Brothers
You never had a fight with your brother. That’s the strange part.
There was no slammed door, no unforgivable sentence. There were calls you didn’t return, birthdays that went past, things that needed saying and never at the right moment. And one day it had been two years and neither of you could say exactly when it started.
Underneath it there’s nearly always the same thing: a comparison that began when you were children and that nobody ever withdrew. One was the responsible one and the other the creative one. One was going to make it and the other was the worry. The parts were handed out when you were six and nine, and at fifty you’re still playing them.
The worst of it is that the comparison hurts in both directions. The one who did well looks down on the other and quietly envies his freedom, because he was the one who carried what the family expected. The one who turned out odd feels like the failure and envies the approval that never came his way. Neither of them is at peace, and each is sure the other one is.
The book I work from begins exactly here, and it’s worth knowing: it isn’t a book about the soul that happens to mention a family. It’s the other way round. The first line of the whole thing, before anything else, is a blind father asking after his sons:
Dhṛtarāṣṭra said: O Sañjaya, after assembling in the place of pilgrimage at Kurukṣetra, what did my sons and the sons of Pāṇḍu do, being desirous to fight?
Bhagavad-gītā 1.1. 1972 edition.
Look at how he puts it: my sons and the sons of Pāṇḍu. They’re cousins, raised together, family. And in that one sentence they’re already split into two camps by the mouth of the man who loves them.
There’s the mechanism. The division wasn’t invented on the battlefield. It came from the house, from long before, from the way they were named.
And there’s a detail in that verse I find the hardest of all: this is happening at a place of pilgrimage. At the place you go to be purified. It happens at weddings and funerals too, which is where the family gathers and where what has been shut for years comes open.
I’m not going to tell you to phone your brother. What I’m telling you is to look at who handed out the parts, because it wasn’t the two of you, and neither of you is obliged to keep playing his.