Family Peace

There is an adage that my husband likes to repeat from time to time in regards to the family. "You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, you can even pick your friend's nose...but you can't pick your family." I am guessing we all experience "stuff" with our families. The longer I live the more I realize that the old Leave it to Beaver nuclear display of functionality, normalcy, really doesn't exist. I am sure Ward Cleaver had issues, maybe he was a closet alcoholic. And Mrs. Cleaver, I am sure she had a touch of OCD (I mean there wasn't anything out of place in her house, ever). Beaver.....we didn't get to see Beaver grow up, so we have no idea what actually happened to him. It seems that our only insight into any sort of aberrant behavior was Eddie Haskell, who was probably the normal one among them all, because he didn't try to pretend he was anything other than he was. He wasn't trying to uphold some ideal of what he "should"be.

Why is any of this relevant? Well, I am presently engaged in what I like to refer to as "Peace Talks" with my beloved sister. We love the dickens out of each other, but over the years, something has been lost in translation and we have reached an impasse. A place where things need to be talked about and dealt with and understood. Not a bad place. In fact it is actually a good place. A fertile place for growth and understanding for both of us. If we had been merely friends and not sisters, it is possible that we might have let the relationship go, because, quite frankly, its hard work to reach a place of understanding. And its human nature NOT to want to do that kind of hard work. 

And that is what the family is for. Of course the family is also a place where we derive our love, our support, our roots, they are the ones who bear witness to the passage of our lives, who help us feel some sort of relevance, but it is also where we arrive to work out our issues. It's not random, happenstance, that you showed up in your family. It was necessitated by the life lessons that you needed to work out this time around. I know quite a few people who say it doesn't matter how evolved they feel they may have become in their own lives, when they get together with the family, they revert back to the behaviors of that eleven year-old. Family stuff is old and deep. It doesn't get any deeper than that. So, I thank my sister for helping me learn more about myself, as uncomfortable as it feels at times, because I am clear that my purpose here is a path of evolution, in the spiritual sense, above and beyond anything else.

And it becomes quite easy to see how difficult it will be to achieve world peace. If it is difficult for two people who grew up in the same culture under the same roof to get along, it almost seems impossible that the human family will ever achieve peace. I mentioned a quote in a previous post that I love by Albert Einstein: "Problems cannot be solved by the same level of consciousness that created them." It is apparent that we are all going to have to evolve if peace, individual, familial, and on a global scale, is ever going to be a reality. And this evolution is a difficult path, because it means confronting the egoic structures that were laid in place very early on. And that ego, that wild wild ego...

"You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, you can even pick your friend's nose", but in the end, thank god "you can't pick your family."