“The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.”
― Mother Teresa
I always get sentimental/philosophical/preachy around my birthday, and my birthday was a week ago. So, you have been warned.
Most people like to hear themselves talk. I am, of course, one of these people, which is one of the reasons I send a newsletter out every month. There is nothing wrong with talking, as long as we are willing to listen in return. That is the problem (in my opinion) with social media—we put our “content” out there in the world, and other people who think the same way we do respond and tell us they agree. And then we think we’re right. What’s worse is that we think everyone who doesn’t agree with us is wrong.
Maybe if it stopped there, it would be okay. I mean, most people do think their beliefs, on whatever subject, are correct, and this was the case even before the prevalence of the Internet. If we didn’t think we were right, then presumably we wouldn’t hold those beliefs. Maybe what makes the situation worse today is that we are unwilling to hear what the other side has to say. Not only that, we don’t believe the other side has a right to believe what they believe. We don’t want to deal with them at all. We want to excise them from our lives.
This philosophy of “I don’t agree with you, so I’m not going to interact with you” is so pervasive in our culture today that we don’t just see it on social media posts or on talk shows or in celebrity rants. We see it in our families. Parents cutting off their children because they differ in their moral beliefs. Children writing off their parents because they don’t share the same politics. Siblings refusing to speak to each other because of a difference in opinion.
There are certain things in life we have no control over. Things we are born with and over which we had no say—the color of our skin, how tall we grow up to be, our aptitude for music, and, yes, what family we’re born into. But family is family, and it is ours, and we have to make the best of it, recognizing that it’s imperfect and messy and loud and uncomfortable and, sometimes, painful. That’s life. There are good parts, and there are bad parts. Cutting ourselves off from family is like cutting out our own roots. And we all know what happens to a tree without roots.
We don’t have to agree with everything our family says or does. We don’t need to always smile politely and nod. We don’t even need to enjoy the company of every member of our family, all the time. But we do need to care for them, to love them and respect them. If there is still such a thing as duty in today’s world, it is that—to do everything we can to keep our family in our lives and in our children’s lives.
The family unit is a microcosm of our world. We can talk all we want about making the world a better place, but if we don’t start by trying to improve the relationships within our own families, then we are doomed to failure. Because the only way to heal the world is to promote love, respect, forgiveness, and acceptance within our own families.
- Kathryn Amurra