Health and Family Point: day 6 a reflection

Yesterday I had too much going on to be introspective. That’s life! Among the things that came up was my involvement in a group. Family is not exactly the same for everyone and this group is a proxy family for a lot of people but is it one for me?

Maybe it would be best to think of family as those who you are in contact with regularly. If you see them about once a week they qualify. This of course would mean that, for a season, even the annoying customers or patrons would be family. I work for a public service there are a collection of smelly men who are a part of my familiar world.

Some people we reject. It’s a repulsion feeling like magnets with the same poles facing each other refusing to touch. The close family is who you eat with and the closest is who you would sleep around. It takes some of the complex feelings out of the equation if I think of family in this way.

I don’t have to like everyone or trust everyone but they are still some how part of my tribe. Right, by extension all humans get included eventually because people come and go from our life and they become members of a past family.

Ok what kind of action can promote harmony in my immediate family the one I sleep around say? Sleep around is tricky because we jump to sexual ideas so fast. What I mean is would I feel comfortable and get ok sleep if I fell asleep in the same building as this person? It gets more intimate the smaller the space we are talking about.

We who have suffered emotional and spiritual challenges need family or we’d die. I was reading the twelve traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous and found them really hugely deep but simple. There is and emphasis on group harmony and how they saw that alone they would not be able to maintain their practice of sobriety but in the society of fellow strugglers there was hope and that was enough to keep them going moment to moment.

Too bad we are social creatures. It is so inconvenient to have to communicate. I am wrestling myself on a particular subject the above mentioned group participation. I do have one foot in and one out on almost every thing out there. I would like to not constantly ask myself if I am staying or going. It would be a relief. I guess this is why we tend to make things definite, like, labeling people family, or friend, or enemy. We think there is a protocol to follow once the label is affixed and that we will never have to figure out if the person is safe or not again. They will be frozen into this broad role based on repulsion or attraction. Nope. Not what I experience. I had focused a lot on individual actions leading to health in my past. Today I see that it’s a group effort and that actually terrifies me.