No principles today.
Image by anyjazz65 via Flickr
Today is a day for introspection and not timeless truths. The only timeless truths here at RCB are borrowed from somewhere else anyway. I don’t pretend to have life changing insights and original thinking. Life isn’t about being original anyway. It is about making the best use of your resources and focusing on what is important. I’m being philosophical today coming off a very strange Thanksgiving Day and I’m trying to make something good out of it.
We struggled this Thanksgiving. Getting the entire family together this year was difficult with one son in LA and the other a slave of commerce. Our LA son drove up but our local son had to work Thanksgiving Day so we had Thanksgiving on Tuesday night. Talk about crazy-making. On Thursday we watched football and ate leftovers with the LA son. Today, he is driving back home and it is all back to normal with just me and my wife to finish the leftovers.
Not Norman Rockwell but not Ozzie Osbourne either
At our house, It wasn’t the picture perfect Normal Rockwell Thanksgiving. But then we aren’t the picture perfect Norman Rockwell family either. Life is messy. Families are complicated. Interpersonal relationships are tinged with dark overtones and human weakness. We try our best but it doesn’t always come out warm and wonderful, especially when your models are from the media and not real life.
Even under the best circumstances,Thanksgiving is difficult to handle. There are just too many expectations and too many visions about how it is supposed to be. Families are supposed to warm, loving and supportive and Thanksgiving is when it all gets displayed. TV and news always features the warm and wonderful family stories about great fathers and extraordinary sons. Thanksgiving day was full of stories about the picture perfect Harbaugh family with those two football coach brothers. Then I look around the Carlson manse. It is enough to make a person sick.
Is it time to give up?
It all leaves me feeling quite empty. Our family just doesn’t measure up to the image and it is probably all my fault. We fuss. Sometimes we’re downright nasty. It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong with u and why we can’t be like we see on TV. .So that’s where my thinking is on Black Friday, feeling sorry for myself that I don’t have the perfect family. What did I do wrong?
But wait a minute!
But after a time there came a wake up moment. I stopped beating myself up and changed my perspective. It’s true that I’m not perfect and our family has it’s shortcomings as well but how bad are we really? And how many flaws have been covered up for those perfect families on TV. Aren’t they ever human and petty? I know my own flaws intimately and I experience the dysfunctional aspects of my family on a regular basis. It’s not easy to ignore them. On the other hand, I know very little about the apparently perfect people praised in the media. They look good from afar but they might be different up close and personal. They might be real people like us when you dig deeper.
So now that I’ve worked through my feelings of inadequacy, I’m feeling better about myself and my family. We aren’t perfect but then we never claimed to be. Nobody is ever going to feel let down after getting to know me better. I never wanted to star on TV anyway. I’m as good as I can be and trying each day to be better. And that is really what is important in life.
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