My father used to always say, “Be kind, son. Everybody’s going through something.”
And you know what? It’s true.
When I stand up in a room full of people these days and talk about my unusual family and all of its issues, I know for certain that we aren’t the only ones with a little wackiness and trouble. Somebody came up to me a few weeks ago after one of my talks and said “Geez, I thought MY family was the most dysfunctional family in the world, but yours takes the cake.” Hmmm…Doesn’t ‘disfunctional’ imply that something DOESN’T work? Our family had all the same stuff going on as every family has, but somehow the choices my folks and many of the people in our orbit made were different and they led to very different results. What they did actually worked just fine.
I guess it wasn’t disfunctional though it certainly had all the elements to be.
It was functional.
So, let’s see what all this means. Everybody has issues. Every family certainly does. And, they’re going to deal with them the best way they know how.
Voila! That makes me understand maybe for the first time the real value of Rich People Shop Here. It’s one thing to tell me in theory what I should do when my hair is on fire, or when I’ve been offended and my gut is telling me to react. It’s quite another to hear about real people who faced these same hair-on-fire issues and decided to take a different road, the high road. It’s good to be able to follow them through the story and see where the high road leads, after all is said and done.
Functional. That means it works, right?
It stops being a theory and it becomes a road map. Imperfect people who didn’t do it all right everytime, but you can read about how much of the time they made good choices. Readers so far are telling me that they can relate, they can follow, they can see the future and the options a bit more clearly, and they can connect.
And, I think there’s something very comforting about that.
This little epiphany makes me want to get in my car and just start driving all around and stopping wherever anybody will lend an ear. I’m thinking this story and the take-aways could save people a lot of wrong turns and heartache and wasted time…
