Solutions Through Compassionate Communication.
Bring Flowers, Not AssumptionsWhat’s easier than holding preconceived notions about others? They can parade through our minds as if on auto-pilot. Try to erase your set notions about those who will join you for the festivity. Instead, attend the event with a clean slate… and a bouquet of flowers for the host.
Picture this:
An extended family is gathered for a Thanksgiving feast. A granddaughter announces she’s moving in with her boyfriend. A son has brought his same-sex partner to meet the family. You learn your favorite cousin had an abortion. The family vegetarian ostentatiously declines the turkey and anything it touched. Your Mom’s friend who helped make dinner is a guy 10 years younger than she and you suspect he’s more than a “friend.” A Marine in uniform and a peace activist complete the scene.
(I’m only partially making this up. I’ve seen each of these situations – but, I confess, never all at once!) [Read more…]
It’s that time of year again. We thought this blog that we posted a year ago might still have some relevance since many of us will celebrate the holidays with family reunions. Let us know what you think.
I hate to admit it, but there are times when a tough conversation may not be advisable. Take, for example, Holiday Season. Let’s say that this Christmas, or Hanukah, it’s your turn to host the family. This may mean houseguests. Cousins or children or whoever are visiting for a couple of days. Too much may be going on for you all to launch into a heavy-duty conversation about Mother’s driving, moving grand dad to a nursing home, or discussing a relative’s will.
For that matter, it may be useful to examine what you can you do as host to ensure that your guests have a positive and memorable visit.
1. Don’t over-program. Unless your visitors are high-energy personalities and are happy to go along with whatever you suggest, why not suggest options before their visit and/or have a few possibilities in mind when they arrive? Don’t appear let down if your guest doesn’t share your enthusiasm for a museum visit or a nature walk.
2. Think through surprises: Be they in the food department, or the unexpected appearance of a long-lost relative showing up, or another Guess What?
3. Check possible food allergies, dietary restrictions, etc., before your guests arrive. Tis better to prepare an extra veggie or two before the big Xmas feast than learn of Cousin Ann’s recent conversion to vegetarianism just as you begin surgery on a perfectly cooked gobbler. And if a guest brings along his or her own gluten-free, carb-free, salt-free, fat-free, and sugar-free whatever, let it go.
4. Tread softly on the jobs front. With so many folks out of work, you may want to tiptoe around your son-in-law’s employment situation; especially if you’ve heard rumblings about cut-backs at his place of work.
5. Try (gently) to find out about your guests’ departure times. You don’t want your “What time are you leaving?” query to sound like an invitation to depart sooner than planned.
6. Transportation. You’re in line for a Silver Star for Hosting if you arrange for your over-night guests to have use of a car during their visit. This gives both you and your guests a chance for a few hours’ respite from each other.
7. Pets Department. If you know that one of your guests ‘has a thing’ about animals, keep Fido, the pup, or Hermione, the cat, out of the dining room and kitchen during meals. At least Aunt Alice who hates your cat (above all others) won’t go ballistic like the time when the critter jumped into her lap as she was about to tuck into your home-made pumpkin pie.
Let us know your favorite tips. And enjoy your guests!
Sig
Thinking about holiday gatherings and all the joy and pain and messiness that come with families can be exhausting.
Yesterday morning on public radio’s “On Being” Krista Tippett interviewed Joanna Macy, 81, a Buddhist translator of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Macy spoke about pain and love and loss. She said not to run from the discomfort . . . “if we can be fearless, can be with our pain, it turns. . . . [W]hen we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns to reveal its other face, . . . our love, our inseparable connectedness with all life.”
Macy said, “I’m not insisting that we be brimming with hope. It’s OK not be optimistic. . . . Feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present. . . . The main thing is that you’re showing up. . . and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.”
Our families are not perfect, we are not perfect. Nothing may have changed. Your mother-in-law may still be critical; your uncle may still have asinine opinions. That’s ok. Rilke says, “If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.”
Just breathe deep, show up, and enjoy the turkey.
Carolyn
To hear the program or download poems, go to http://www.onbeing.org/program/wild-love-world/6
Picture this: An extended family is gathered for a Thanksgiving feast. A granddaughter announces she’s moving in with her boyfriend. A son has brought his same-sex partner to meet the family. You learn your favorite cousin had an abortion. The family vegetarian ostentatiously declines the turkey and anything it touched. Your Mom’s friend who helped make dinner is a guy 10 years younger than she and you suspect he’s more than a “friend.” A Marine in uniform and a peace activist complete the scene.
(I’m only partially making this up. I’ve seen each of these situations – but, I confess, never all at once!)
The need to be right and righteous can derail family relationships — sometimes forever– quicker than anything else. When someone says, “It’s a matter of principle” or starts quoting Scripture to buttress a position, or refers to those who disagree as “evil,” it’s time to pass the Pepto Bismol.
What’s wrong with wanting to be right? And good? Nothing, if we have the humility to understand we may be wrong. Or, more realistically, we may be partly right and partly wrong. Of course it’s a good thing to seek truth and to act from a moral basis. But we can only see through our own limited experience. To insist that another is not only wrong but even immoral leads to broken families, broken politics, and in extreme cases, war.
And yet, common ground, common values can be found in the midst of so much diversity. We just have to be willing to focus on the big picture.
So what can this family talk about? Anything they want to, if they keep their vision large enough. They may still have many common values: a yearning to give and receive love, kindness to animals, a safe world in which to bring up children, respect for human life. There are many ways to express these values. Some are represented at the table; others haven’t yet been dreamed.
Rumi, a 12th century Persian poet, said it this way:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I will meet you there.
Happy family gatherings,
Carolyn Parr