Why These Moments Matter

It has taken forty-eight years to grasp the reality of how good things happen, they are an act of the will on the part of someone.   As a child, Mom made dinners happen and took us from point a to point b and Dad would orchestrate game nights and visits with cousins and aunts and uncles, but as kids, we drifted from big event to big event. So to us, as kids, it felt organic, natural, ordinary. This was simply what you did.  

As an adult, I began to see the effort involved in reunions, especially in deliberately gathering for non event events.  Parties became tied to reasons for parties, like weddings, baptisms, birthdays and sadly, funerals.  The ordinariness of getting together with family became less ordinary as we all grew older, moved, and began establishing lives that focused on lesser things like jobs, homes, and school.  It wasn't a lack of love for anyone, but there was a lack of will to practice that love, a form of familial sloth that crept into relationships, rendering them a collection of fond memories, rather than an ongoing experience of each other.  

Going to a wedding, one of the last weddings of the generation of cousins, everyone began to feel the hard march of time, and how the hardening of familial arteries could cause ongoing damage if left unchecked.  We would have to will ourselves out of that funk, to will ourselves beyond our comfort zone if we were going to have connections not dominated only by whenever someone had a wedding, baptism or funeral.  We'd have to have moments of ordinary time, and to have those, someone would have to "Will it."  

So we made a start, an invitation to do things, which is again, like anything else, a beginning, hopefully of a greater experience, of all of us growing closer together.   What I hope, is everyone will make that brave start, issue beginnings, so that we turn what is a momentary inspiration born of recognizing we want to have relationships that are more than in name only, into a willful habit of fellowship, and tie us as family beyond the cumulative memories of past events.