I forget, from time to time, just how effective events are at building family-ness. Take a 50th birthday or wedding aniversary, a 1st birthday, a civil union, add people, a small dose of reasonableness and goodwill, a large dash of food and drink, mix in pleasant surroundings and sprinkle with a few speaches, leave to percolate for 6-14 hours and voila! Your family factor increases.
I love it. I particularly love it when I'm near the middle of the event and it strengthens the relationships within and between my whanau.
It also has the magical ability to turn friends into family (though it often takes repeated applications). In this way we build strong communities which can help to survive the difficult times, which insure us against hardship and give us a sense of belonging and of the world making sense.
I worry that the liberal movement of the last 100 years is making people feel lost and unsafe, like they don't know what the right thing to do is, and that they can't rely on others to take care of them when they need it. In classical liberalism there is nothing which encourages you to take care of others, only to avoid hurting them. I think this is not enough. People have to find some way of building themselves a life which is secure against the surges and storms of the world. This security is important to people, and the more worried they feel, the more important it becomes. I worry that the most immediate answer is to follow a charismatic leader off the nearest traditionalist cliff. That is not a good enough answer to get us through the challenges of modernity and globalisation.
So I'm glad to have found a way to build relationships between people which make them feel happy, and understood and invigorated. I feel proud to do it on terms I have thought about and felt my way around thoroughly. I am indebted to my family to have inherited a non-traditional, but very effective way of approaching living in the world while still being able to make my own decisions about it. And I'm thankful to have family and friends who are so willing to be generous and lovely to each other.
Kia kaha, may we all live long and be well loved.
Posted by carla at March 2, 2006 04:17 PM