
As I’ve gotten older I've noticed that my family seems to have grown further and further apart. I wonder if that’s the way the ebb and flow of family life goes? When I was in my early twenties and my grandparents were still alive we all seemed to get together every weekend at BBQ’s, birthday parties and more. Now, it seems we go months and months without seeing each other. My siblings all have their own families with their own busy lives so time together is harder and harder to find.
It’s really makes me sad, actually, because it seems time moves on and no one really stops to see that we aren’t going to be around forever…that there will come a day that we will look back and wish we had stopped and smelled the roses and appreciated each and every family member for what they have brought to us. But… by then, it will be too late.
I recently reread a passage (Chapter 2) from “Families” by Anderson’s father, Wyatt Cooper. He’s wondering what happened to the family?
They are saying these days that the family is finished, at least as we have known it. That’s a sad and lonely thought. I suppose they may even be right. Everything passes. Other venerable institutions have vanished. Civilizations fall. Worlds end. Gods, even, have died and are dying, so there is no real reason to think that anything lasts forever.Wyatt goes on to talk, at length, about his family. Here are some of his conclusions…

The family arena was a battleground on which some skirmishes were lost and some were won; it was a place where rages flared and hatreds blasted, but we cared and we kept track. The family was a community, and once you found your place in it, you were armored for citizenship beyond it in the great Family of Man.
But they tell us now it’s all over. New ways are going to be found. The fashion these days is for change, and the rush for change, the race for the new, is so frantic, the pace so accelerated, that the less venturesome among us can get quite dizzy even standing still and looking on. We hear and read daily about startling new breakthroughs, new life forms and styles, new quick cures for sick souls, new “fun” treatments for ailing lives; and nobody asks what happened to yesterday’s miracle discovery. It would seem, with all the new announcements, that all our problems should have been solved with last evening’s edition of the newspaper. Instead, we look about and see our neighbors standing in shock, exhausted from the running, neck-deep in “How to Discover Your Real Self” books, panic and hunger visible in their eyes, sadly clinging to the hope that tomorrow’s pill will make everything right.
It won’t, and there’s no reason why it should. Our lives are trial and error, joy and sorrow, work and rest, some peace and some turmoil, and our happiness consists of living the good and the bad, of keeping our wits about us, of holding onto a little pluck, of cherishing those things that embellish life and rejecting those things that diminish it. The nirvanas and promises of instant gratification being merchandised these days have about as much substance as the enlightenment of those rich ladies who tell you they went to India for two weeks and found “this marvelous peace” while gazing out the windows of the air-conditioned hotel, presumably past the bodies of dying babies in the streets.
Individual fulfillment is all the rage now. One’s loyalty is only toward one’s own self-realization. We read almost daily, sometimes in admiring account, of mothers and father who, encouraged by their therapists and their envious friends, announce that they are renouncing all prior commitments (made before their consciousness got raised) and are belatedly setting out to find their true roles in the world. Their bewildered and abandoned children are on their own. God knows what is supposed to happen to their fulfillment, their sense of worth. Where are these children expected to find that sense of identity their newly liberated parents are out beating the bushes for? The mind boggles.
Chaos remains chaos however cheerfully it may be disguised as freedom
Let us, then, spare a few worlds in praise of the family before we casually wave it away into extinction; this battered institution that has enabled us to survive all these centuries, and provided the climate, the nourishment, and the soil from which man’s greatness has sprung, let us, at least, take a look at what it has been or what, at it’s best, it has aspired to. Let us reflect upon it’s failings and it’s accomplishments; let us examine it’s past and it’s possibilities.
Sometimes it does feel like the family is dying but maybe that’s just from where I sit in life. Maybe it’s meant to be that way? The older we get the less time we have. Wyatt seemed a bit ahead of his time talking about how hectic life is and will get. He couldn’t have been more right even though he didn’t live to see how much worse it would get.
I guess my point is… stop and smell the roses. Don’t take your family for granted and don’t stop realizing that nothing is more important than those people that are there for you. Whether it’s the family you were born into or a family you made, don’t forget to take time to appreciate them all!
******ATA FAMILY NEWS*****
And on that note, we like to welcome a new member of our family! Everyone welcome
Cyn to
ATA! She’s the owner of THE
Michael Ware blog and will be contributing to
ATA a few times a week.
Also, we here at the ATA family would like to wish Sheryn a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY on Monday! We’d like to take a moment to appreciate her hard work and hope she has a wonderful day.
*Disclaimer* We are using a small excerpt of this out of print book under the Fair Use act. This excerpt is less than the amount legally allowable*