Living life together…In our world full of busy lifestyles and hard work we sometimes forget how we were created to live: together. If you visit with most people over 60 they can usually tell you how they were just down the dirt road from Grandma’s home cookin or just around the block from Uncle John and his odd shaped glass bottles filled with Coca-Cola. It’s amazing to me that in what seems like no time at all we have gone from a country and a people that valued nothing more than friends and family to a country and a people that seem to want nothing to do with friends or family.
Stories of best friends stealing spouses to daily divorces, high school sweethearts going from ‘love’ to ‘hate’ in a heartbeat–all these tales seem to have infiltrated our society so much that we don’t even bat an eye. Instead we wake in the morning headed out to punch the clock, grab some drive through for lunch then back to the grind. Only to get home in time to drop the kids off at practice or dance then rush home to get the pizza that’s being delivered for the fifth time this week. I’m just tired writing about this hectic schedule! The year’s pass and we somehow don’t even realize that we certainly have NOT lived life together. Maybe it’s high time that we re-evaluate how our time and energies are spent and learn a lesson from times past…that maybe it wasn’t so bad to be able to walk outside and smell Grandma’s cookin…and maybe Uncle John’s crazy old stories weren’t so boring after all. Maybe living life together could happen again…maybe.
I went back in your archives to October 2007 for this one since I have been thinking about the concept of family lately.
Burdens shared are burdens relieved. I had the extreme privilege of living across an arroyo from my grandparents when I was a child and I was just thinking how I wish I could relive those experiences for a while with my adult appreciation of what they taught me and how loving they were. My folks and my grandparents were farmers on opposite sides of the same valley in southern New Mexico—oh how uncomplicated life was then because if something came up to make us laugh or make us cry, the family was right there to share it and deal with it and no one person felt all the burden of any event.
Sometimes I fantasize about people living life together today, whether blood relatives or churches or any group of people willing to come together and do life together where everything is shared—nothing is just mine, but everything is ours. We produce income as a group, we share expenses as a group. Hey, maybe even work with an insurance company to be our own group for insurance coverage. The ones in the group who are blessed with the greater incomes are not possessive of it but feel a special joy that they can contribute more to the group. Everyone feels a sense of doing what they can to contribute to the group. Everyone as purpose in the group. The children have many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandmothers, and grandfathers to share in their accomplishments. Sounds kind of like a hippie commune, but I see so many people in this world who have far more than they need and way too many people who have less than they need. Hmmm…seems like I have heard of whole cultures who rather successfully lived life this way.
The problem with the American way of life is that so many people through no fault of their own have things happen to them so beyond their control and they wind up lacking food, clothing, shelter, and a proper image of their worth as humans all because they don’t have a family to cover their deficits.
A capitalistic society is seemingly fine and dandy for the individual who was lucky enough to accumulate sufficient material possessions to provide them with all their physical
needs. But is that all life is about—just accumulating and hoarding money and stuff for just myself and maybe my blood family?
During the Great Depression, my parents and some other couples (at least 2 maybe more) drove out to California to find jobs as they were scarce in Clovis, NM where they were living at the time. They wound up renting one house for all of them and some found jobs and others maintained the house and watched the kids and they just shared life together knowing that they had different skills and some might find jobs and others might not, but they were in this together.
Could this happen today—-why not???
Could those who have church families or group associations start sharing life like families should?
As you said Mitch, “Maybe living life together could happen again…maybe.”
I like your concept here, Don. It’s just sad that in today’s America, it’s hard to present ideas and beliefs like this without someone getting political on you and in your face. Why is socialism and taking care of the greater good of everyone frowned upon? I’m not advocating we reinvent America as a socialist nation, but we need to somehow get closer to the ideals of togetherness and taking care of one another before we push ourselves so far away that we all just become self-centered capitalists, only concerned about our own material goods as you described.
Thank you for this insight this afternoon, it helped wake me up from my typical “Friday 4 PM Slump.”