Christmas 2006 - Discoveries about Families & Community
click here to see more photosI spent this past Christmas with my London family, the Jones'. Cousin's of my mom's here in the UK. Their hospitality was amazing, and I felt completely at home despite being out of New Orleans for the first time over the Christmas holidays. While my time with the Jones' was amazing, my biggest event over the holidays came just before Christmas as I continued my introspection via a letter to my family. Here is what I came up with:
A few things have come through in my recent introspection. The first is a deep seeded discomfort with emotional suffering in both myself and in others. I expect this comes from some of the emotional trauma I faced while growing up as a brother and son always wanting to be included in what people were doing, at Holy Name with the harsh clique that formed in my class during 4th and 5th grade, at Newman when I struggling to figure out if I identified more with the cool kids, the athlete crowd or with the curious intellectuals and even at Harvard when many of the people who I thought were friends at the end of my freshman year abandoned me at a time when I had no other support. The second thing I’ve discovered is the fascination I have with exploring new things in the world. Not just locations, but people, behaviours, and cultures. Obvious examples are the trips I’ve taken to vastly different places in the world like Alaska, Cuba, Argentina and now all around Europe. Discoveries in both of these areas allow me to better understand the way different people behave when times are good, tough, or anywhere in between.
Learning these things has helped me to reflect on and understand my thoughts and actions much more intimately. For example, I now know that my drive to be an entertainer comes from a desire to distract people from their issues in life and replace those issues with positive thoughts and experiences. And I know that my interest in listening to people talk about their issues comes from a desire to help them better understand what is happening to them, why they feel the way they do and how they can improve the situation. I also know that my motivation to go out and explore the world comes from my desire to understand other people and cultures. But leaving the comfort of your own home can be daunting, and I would have never had the courage without the inspiration and encouragement to be a self-starter that dad gave me while I was growing up. What’s more interesting than understanding these thoughts and actions at the level I now do is the discovery that they are part of a larger effort that has driven me all of my life.
The more I consider my thoughts and actions and how they fit together, the more I realize that so much of what I do is related to creating communities everywhere I go. And the most intimate and powerful of those communities are actually families of mine. This might be with the hundreds of people I’ve met in London over the 14 months I’ve been here, or it could be just at the dining table when eight loosely connected people come together for a 3 hour dinner. To me, the amazing thing about communities is that they are a social construct naturally formed because of what they inherently provide for their members. And what they provide is exactly the two things that I discovered to be important to me in life: support for emotional suffering and a platform for discovery and growth. I only just made this connection in recent weeks, but when I realized how I learned this lesson, I literally became so overwhelmed with excitement, pride, guilt and a terrible sadness that I cried for almost an hour as I tried to write about it. Much of that writing is coming through in this entry.
To explain further, my excitement came from the fact that this is a lesson I’ve been learning since the day I was born. Mom, Dad, Jo, Mike, Grandma, Grampy, Teta, Jido, Charles, Jill, Yasmin, Xan, all my aunts, uncles and cousins and now Kimberly have been teaching me this throughout my life. What an amazing feeling it is to know you’ve been struggling to understand something for so long, and then one day it hits you.
The pride comes from realizing that such a powerful lesson, probably the most important lesson I have learned in life, the thing that inspires almost everything I do, has come from MY family. Not from any inspired professor or company leader or anyone famous like that, but from my family. And the fact that I refer to the most intimate and powerful communities as “families” tells me how amazing the family is who I group up with.
My guilt comes from things I’ve done, said or thought about my family over the years that might have implied or represented the family as something less than I now know it to be. I’m sure that the naiveté of my youth got the best of me at times, and while I know that some things were necessary for my personal exploration and growth, I feel guilty that they came about at all. The good news is that, at this point, after all my explorations, I’ve come around to a self-discovered feeling of pride and love for you all.
The sadness is an interesting one. I’m sad because the thing I want most to avoid, emotional suffering, is the thing I created by leaving New Orleans and then by leaving San Francisco. And I’ve created this suffering for the people I love the most and the people who’ve taught me the importance of family, i.e. my families in those cities. Sadly, I’ll have to do it again if I leave London because I’m creating a wonderful family here as well. What’s interesting about the sadness is that it forced me to think about nature of families and communities and discover how they function as an almost perfect system. They provide inspiration to explore new things, which in turn can potentially create suffering (like when I left home), but then they also provide the support you need to deal with that suffering. They provide a platform for growth and change, but also for safety and security. So in a convoluted way, my sadness has actually been the best emotion because now it’s made me think deeply about the nature of communities and how they work, and I expect that this will be crucial to my further research into the subject.
A few things have come through in my recent introspection. The first is a deep seeded discomfort with emotional suffering in both myself and in others. I expect this comes from some of the emotional trauma I faced while growing up as a brother and son always wanting to be included in what people were doing, at Holy Name with the harsh clique that formed in my class during 4th and 5th grade, at Newman when I struggling to figure out if I identified more with the cool kids, the athlete crowd or with the curious intellectuals and even at Harvard when many of the people who I thought were friends at the end of my freshman year abandoned me at a time when I had no other support. The second thing I’ve discovered is the fascination I have with exploring new things in the world. Not just locations, but people, behaviours, and cultures. Obvious examples are the trips I’ve taken to vastly different places in the world like Alaska, Cuba, Argentina and now all around Europe. Discoveries in both of these areas allow me to better understand the way different people behave when times are good, tough, or anywhere in between.
Learning these things has helped me to reflect on and understand my thoughts and actions much more intimately. For example, I now know that my drive to be an entertainer comes from a desire to distract people from their issues in life and replace those issues with positive thoughts and experiences. And I know that my interest in listening to people talk about their issues comes from a desire to help them better understand what is happening to them, why they feel the way they do and how they can improve the situation. I also know that my motivation to go out and explore the world comes from my desire to understand other people and cultures. But leaving the comfort of your own home can be daunting, and I would have never had the courage without the inspiration and encouragement to be a self-starter that dad gave me while I was growing up. What’s more interesting than understanding these thoughts and actions at the level I now do is the discovery that they are part of a larger effort that has driven me all of my life.
The more I consider my thoughts and actions and how they fit together, the more I realize that so much of what I do is related to creating communities everywhere I go. And the most intimate and powerful of those communities are actually families of mine. This might be with the hundreds of people I’ve met in London over the 14 months I’ve been here, or it could be just at the dining table when eight loosely connected people come together for a 3 hour dinner. To me, the amazing thing about communities is that they are a social construct naturally formed because of what they inherently provide for their members. And what they provide is exactly the two things that I discovered to be important to me in life: support for emotional suffering and a platform for discovery and growth. I only just made this connection in recent weeks, but when I realized how I learned this lesson, I literally became so overwhelmed with excitement, pride, guilt and a terrible sadness that I cried for almost an hour as I tried to write about it. Much of that writing is coming through in this entry.
To explain further, my excitement came from the fact that this is a lesson I’ve been learning since the day I was born. Mom, Dad, Jo, Mike, Grandma, Grampy, Teta, Jido, Charles, Jill, Yasmin, Xan, all my aunts, uncles and cousins and now Kimberly have been teaching me this throughout my life. What an amazing feeling it is to know you’ve been struggling to understand something for so long, and then one day it hits you.
The pride comes from realizing that such a powerful lesson, probably the most important lesson I have learned in life, the thing that inspires almost everything I do, has come from MY family. Not from any inspired professor or company leader or anyone famous like that, but from my family. And the fact that I refer to the most intimate and powerful communities as “families” tells me how amazing the family is who I group up with.
My guilt comes from things I’ve done, said or thought about my family over the years that might have implied or represented the family as something less than I now know it to be. I’m sure that the naiveté of my youth got the best of me at times, and while I know that some things were necessary for my personal exploration and growth, I feel guilty that they came about at all. The good news is that, at this point, after all my explorations, I’ve come around to a self-discovered feeling of pride and love for you all.
The sadness is an interesting one. I’m sad because the thing I want most to avoid, emotional suffering, is the thing I created by leaving New Orleans and then by leaving San Francisco. And I’ve created this suffering for the people I love the most and the people who’ve taught me the importance of family, i.e. my families in those cities. Sadly, I’ll have to do it again if I leave London because I’m creating a wonderful family here as well. What’s interesting about the sadness is that it forced me to think about nature of families and communities and discover how they function as an almost perfect system. They provide inspiration to explore new things, which in turn can potentially create suffering (like when I left home), but then they also provide the support you need to deal with that suffering. They provide a platform for growth and change, but also for safety and security. So in a convoluted way, my sadness has actually been the best emotion because now it’s made me think deeply about the nature of communities and how they work, and I expect that this will be crucial to my further research into the subject.
posted by Jason Keck at 1:17 PM
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