Last edit of this page 29/05/08
'To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.' Confucius 551-479 BC
Family love is like the wind: instinctive, raw, fragile, beautiful, at times angry, but always unstoppable. it is our collective breath. It is the world's greatest force....It is our last miracle. James McBride
Family originally meant a band of slaves. Even after the word came to apply to people affiliated by blood and marriage, for many centuries the notion of family referred to authority relations rather than love ones. The sentimentalist of family life and female nurturing was historically and functionally linked to the emergence of competitive individualism and formal egalitarianism for men. Stephanie Coontz quoted in Sociology of the Family.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own unique life form, which cannot be used by any other. Carl Jung
1.0 Intimacy begins at home
We are the fruit of many lives and the result of our everyday habits. Habits become automatic and unconscious, like driving from home to work and not remembering all the places in between.
Getting it right in family and business often seems automatic. Successful people appear to have an almost unconscious sense of the right direction to go. One that sometimes fails them but not often.
However, success is not the good luck that this unconscious competence appears to be. Unconscious competence is the result of underlying good habits, backed up by matching values often but not always set at home. They become the gut feelings or instincts on which we build business and family success.
1.1 Diversity is difference
Nature's habit and her measure of success is diversity.
Even identical twins are not all truly identical and no two siblings can ever grow up in the same family.
Survival of the fittest is not a moral equation.
Community not nature evolves morality and values, both for good and ill. Here is a discussion on nature versus creation on the science forum.
In order to increase diversity, nature has a significant influence on our choice of breeding partner. Opposites attract, partners poach and affairs happen at times of high fertility. Too much difference in the couple, however, breeds trouble between them and with their offspring.
Most differences can be bridged, it is just a matter of how much resources you are willing to commit to bridge maintenance. So don't let nature's desire be the only one making choices at your wedding. More on pre-commitment education on site.
Dramatically opposite partners are not necessarily good friends, nor the ones who bring up kids most wisely nor care best for a business, but they usually have great sex for a time. And sometimes that is enough for success in many other spheres.
Nature cares about sex but not wisdom since she knows the end product is due, 50% to genes and 50% to peer group/community influence. Child abuse, disease and poverty may shift the outcome. And the fittest of those too will survive and thrive.
Wealth and privelage are not that effective in shifting the course of nature.
1.2 Neurons to neighbourhoods
The long-standing debate about the importance of nature versus nurture, considered as independent influences, is overly simplistic and scientifically obsolete. Scientists have shifted their focus to take account of the fact that genetic and environmental influences work together in dynamic ways over the course of development. At any time, both are sources of human potential and growth as well as risk and dysfunction. Both genetically determined characteristics and those that are highly affected by experience are open to intervention. Source
The more I learn from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) the more I understand that everything within us and around us is more plastic than we might think.
Recently a University of Edinburgh team evolved a new species of butterfly in three generations. Something evolutionary theory says should take thousands of years. Another research team found a way to reverse the growth of brain cells back into the stem cells from which they originally formed, and then back again into brain cells.
Given this plasticity, it seems to me environment has considerable influence on the expression of our children's genes. I doubt my redoubtable aunt would have become the stalwart of everything British but for the influence of her naval father and her hitting WW II in her 20's. That generation of women were remarkable and pioneers of the women's movement.
Therefore, I recommend choosing and involving yourself in your children's peer groups and community as best you can - from the very beginning until they have shut all the doors. Even then, keep yours open. It's the other 50% you have significant influence in for some of the time. Those peers will be influential in shaping your child's adult behaviour and attitudes.
School, religious and community groups self-replicate because of parental influence on the climate of the group, their children's peers and mentoring of those peers. So get involved in the community without robbing quality time from your family. Robust success in both businesses and in urban gangs relies on mentoring at every level of the 'club'.
Make your home a place your kid's friends want to come after school and on weekends.
Have a clear and agreed moral compass open to exploration, rather than an authoritarean religious pursuasion that brooks no question.
Earn kids respect and command it, otherwise they will exploit your generosity. Expect a return - there are no free lunches! As a result of taking care in these ways, when there is trouble in their group, you will likely be among the first to notice it and the first to get the right resources in place and in time.
Practise generosity and tough love both locally and globally. Draw the kids into this practice rather than force them in to it with shaming lectures on social justice.
Relaxed, altruistic people are among the happiest, healthiest and longest lived in the world. This is a result of feeling useful in a social network.
Uptight and upright do-gooders are a problem to themselves, their families and the people they 'help'. Their pity can lack empathy. Empathy drives power sharing. Empathy is rarely a pre-requisite for election or promotion to positions of power in any organization.
Sympathy sounds good but impels no action to redress imbalances in power.
Boys respond well to a pack leader and girls someone to admire. In this respect, animal training is great preparation for parenting. Having a pet is not the same thing.
Ultimately, you can't change your or other people's kids or their pets but you can teach awareness and increase the range of options to choose from.
2.0 Wisdom
The most decisive moment in history is the identification of 'self' as opposed to 'Nature'. At this point people become responsible for their own fate and they become afraid. The 'fear of freedom' begins at the point of recognizing one's own responsibility for one's own fate. Fromm
Free will gives us more choices than any other life form on the planet.
That liberty is an enduring power and a burden of responsibility.
It requires something nature packs too little of into our genes - experience in its use.
Young couples have too little life experience to acquire moderation in the exercise of this power.
We call that moderation wisdom.
Nature appears to have distributed the elements of wisdom randomly. Perhaps she cannot know which seemingly hopeless gamble on wisdom opens to another millennia of evolution, and so like any smart investor, spreads the risk.
Wisdom can be described as the exercise of power with each of these traits in balance: dignity, humility and discipline; kindness, compassion, endurance, and justice. These seven come from the kabbalah.
Observers in all mystic traditions of all religions have noticed those random moderators, collected them over many generations and crystallized them into self-moderating precepts.
All religious systems teach almost exactly the same principles. Not so with sectarianism.
2.1 Agency
At the moment of realisation that we are responsible for our own fate, there begins the demise of the idea that 'my nature made me do it' or 'it's just human nature, we can't help it' or 'boys will be boys'.
And here begins liberty's hoorah! - I am free, free to think for myself and free to plan for my own life.
Free to love and free to hate, or not.
This is called agency.
Some folk deny agency and hand it over to a higher power - temporal, spiritual and genetic. But agency we have. It is nature's gamble that survival's free-will can win out on willful self-destruction.
In the shadow of this first dawn of freedom is coiled our fear of freedom.
This fear has self-limiting offspring: fear of success, fear of failure and a crazy fear of nature's diversity - of difference. From these arise all the isms - racism, sexism, classism, etc.. Each is self-defeating and yet persists despite evidence of its extravagant waste.
Diversity raises the intelligence of a group. In fearing difference, we collectively and separately dumb down.
Knowing they won't be interrupted frees people to think faster and say less. Yet we silence difference and consquently think poorly and waste time.
2.2 The wimps survived
Those who survived the journey out of Africa (and we are ALL their children diversified) attend to our fears more than to the opportunities and pleasures in front of us.
The fearless and foolhardy were wiped out by a world then in catastrophic upheaval. There are still a few throwbacks to that gene pool. The rest of us have had to learn to out-fox our fears.
Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures. Jonathan Haidt
These polar, gut feelings have shaped us. In the same way, gravity and the seasons have moulded our bodies and the rhythm of all life's design. Ever present and unavoidable, we can turn free will into an opponent (puritanism) or we can work with it (humanism).
We can stoop under gravity, oppose it and freeze our fears, hunched into our postures, defining our isms. Or we can stand upright, graceful and both flexible, soft and strong using gravity and fear as allies. This is the power of choice and agency. Here, begins compassion.
It is where speaking our truth uplifts all of us. Walking the talk upright rather than uptight. Our family can show the way, but we have to choose.
From awakening to freedom's costs and benefits, we evolve solutions to distance or to embrace it. Perversely, we can distance the benefits and embrace the costs. This has consequences.
3.0 Consequences
It is human to have a long childhood; it is civilized to have an even longer childhood. Long childhoods makes a technical and mental virtuoso out of man, but it also leaves a life-long residue of emotional immaturity. Erik Erikson (1902-1994)
Kidding ourselves about the significance of our life and its choices, diminishes our agency. This is one way to deny the obvious. Embracing life's poignant enormity is another. And there are many places in between as we leave the family nest and set sail against or with the winds of change.
Our peer group is our reference group, co-existent with our future. As we grow and leave home our family recedes, though we carry its habits and values often unexamined.
Some able bodied folk never leave home or their family patterns. This too has costs and benefits.
The family business can turn into a struggle for survival of the fittest. And it can form a functional dynasty.
I strongly advise my clients to moderate nature's way at the door of their family business enterprise. In a similar way competition inside the bedroom is disastrous to a marriage.
It would have to be a third of my work, assisting 25-40 years olds to separate from their family of origin and those family patterns or habits in order to save their marriages and sometimes their businesses.
Some parents have little respect for self-determination. Their fruit rarely falls far from that tree.
These historical forces begin to mould our character and our body armour at an early age. That word 'armour' so close to l'amor and la morte (love and death).
These also have consequences.
With body armour growing in our young, unaware mind we start to seek a life time best fit of ideas, for opportunities and miseries, and with people who support and those who will diminish our freedom. We find what works for us and practice how to react to what doesn't. Family shows the way, but we make the choices.
You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their friends. More than by meeting their parents. You choose your friends, not your family. People would never treat their friends the way some treat their family.
The character of intimacy that we seek, that we share, and that we avoid begins here, whatever our circumstances or parentage, with whatever cards we have been dealt.
For some the moment of realisation is a sudden jolt into self-responsibility, and early in life. That is the spark of success.
3.1 Fate
I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling ... I've just dreamt my life. Richard Branson
Successful people tend to get it and get it early in their lives, that there is no fate but what we make. They have excellent gut feelings based on unconscious competencies and dreams.
For others wisdom about success grows over the years, maturing into a good wine. For some it is an ever deepening awareness of the path, the gate to all mystery. Some just don't get it, ever, and drift on to the end believing in fate. And some slavishly follow a scripture or an ideology, believing that will give them the edge when the world ends. Fate is then synonymous with Revelation.
And that is okay too. The consequences continue to flow, inexorably. In that sense making no choice, chooses a consequence.
Should armageddon arrive, the insects and bacteria will remain to clean up our mess. Life will go on, here or elsewhere. Nature has a limitless playground. The universe is in an infinitely long process of contraction and expansion. With each big bang a new experiment begins, a new set of probabilities unfold.
Take time to smell the flowers, our part in the journey is relatively brief. Time flies.
3.2 If it means nothing ...
When thinking about these probabilities, the artist Francis Bacon concluded it made our existence utterly meaninglessness and absolutely pointless. He was fond of saying, since it means nothing we may as well make our life extraordinary. He chose a simple formula for success, much aided by needing only a couple of hours sleep a night.
No matter which path we take, the dice play a part.
Maintaining generous, big hearted networks of luck supports good fortune. Francis Bacon was both incredibly generous and successful and yet came into life with the family from hell. It twisted him. This in contrast to Branson's origins - 'a family that would kill for each other' he said. I think Bacon's homophobic father would have had him killed if he could, by the stable boys he employed to thrash him as a child.
Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin brand has 10 secrets of success each learned as good habits in his family: 1 You've got to challenge the big ones. 2 Keep it casual. 3 Haggle: everything is negotiable. 4 Have fun working. 5 Do the right things for the brand. 6 Smile for the cameras! 7 Don't lead "sheep", herd "cats". 8 Move like a bullet. 9 Size does matter. 10 Be a common, regular person.
Here is Chapter One of his autobiography 'Losing My Virginity'.
Links to my other articles on site:
- What is a functional family and how to build a relationship centred family
- Pre-commitment relationship education part 1 and part 2 and navigation page
- Turning points in relationships
- Health and a healthy relationship
- Tough love
- How to mend a broken marriage or committed relationship
- the fuser/isolator, pursuer/distancer, people pleaser/injustice collector pattern
Third party articles on site:
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