WeePlanet

We do not choose our families. But if as Timothy Ferriss contends the opposite of happiness is not sadness but boredom then we are victims of happy misfortune. Ana Lisa and I both spring from folk who are positively mental.

We have nutty parents, wack siblings ‘n spice, crazy aunts and uncles, and a few cousins who shouldn’t be walking around unattended. Ah, the bliss of never a dull moment.

Our family may regularly drive us crazy, but their various insanities serve mostly to highlight what dear people they are. They’ve taught us many things, some that we’re trying to unlearn (hence the happy lack of boredom) but most of which we greatly prize.

A short and entirely noncomprehensive list of things we have learned from the modeling of our families:

• The much overlooked and undervalued … curiosity
• Humor and the willingness to use it to challenge, tweak and even shock but generally not to be cruel
• Self-disclosure and self-critique … often in the service of the aforementioned humor
• Self-forgiveness, ideally after an appropriate period of guilt
• Forgiveness of others, generally accompanied by a small amount of needling

And empathy. The famous willingness to walk a mile in another’s shoes. Although we may bring different perspectives to the table, once everyone’s sitting down and facing each other (preferably over food) the relationships take precedence and the impulse is to value the other’s way of seeing the world, madness included. It is no small gift to have this be part of the family dynamic, and we (along with our own personal lunacies) are grateful.

Of course it is possible to have too much of a good thing. My crazy Aunt Alice Good, for example, is currently taking the empathy thing way too far. After a longer-than-expected surgery to alleviate some balance issues, and with oxygen counts a’dipping, she decided to take an adult version of Wee Boy’s ventilator for a spin.

Now we know the Niblet’s birthday is coming up, and people have been so very kind in remembering with us the impact of his short life. But such extreme gestures are not necessary, people, bringing with them as they do this too-familiar sense of worry. Javid, dear one, made us very anxious for a very long time. If the rest of y’all wouldn’t mind not scaring us for, say, the next 10 years minimum, we’d appreciate it.

At the very least we can hope she will make this empathy exercise a brief one. Perhaps we can encourage with a page out of Javid’s playbook.

All together now:

“1 … 2 … 3. Breathe, Alice, breathe. 1 … 2 … 3 …”

C’mon Aunt Alice.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.