Family, Friends and the Importance of Both

You are born with your family. You choose your friends.

Is blood really thicker than water anymore? There used to be a day and time when family was the end-all, be-all of your life. You would defend and honor your family at whatever cost. I believe that era has passed. In today’s day and age, family is little more than a blood-line. It’s a hierarchy that describes your genealogical roots. Granted, there are still plenty of families that are close knit and I intend on having one of those with my sons, but for the most part, families don’t mean what they used to. Even for me, I’m far closer to my friends than I am my own sister (whom I still love dearly). But you must understand, we get along better now that she’s moved away than we did growing up. Which is actually a point worth exploring.

One of the reasons I believe friends have supplanted family in importance is the lack of time they’ve spent with you growing up. You see, your family - for better or worse - knows all about you. They’ve lived with you. They know your tendencies and they know what you were like before growing up. They saw your good decisions and more importantly, they saw the poor ones. Family has a very fine perception of you shaped by the constant exposure they have to you. Fair or not, your family knows you better than most anyone.

But this is also a problem. People change. They grow and learn and hopefully, become different people. Your capabilities expand. You become a different person in many respects. The insecure, awkward, stumbling boy they once knew is now a far more confident and secure man now. But their impression of you is tainted. In some ways, you’ll always be that awkward and insecure teenage boy. In fact, they may be the last ones to accept the new version of you since they knew the other versions so well.

And this is one of the main reason our friends are so important to us. One of the reasons they can become our new family. They don’t necessarily know the old you. They’re more apt to accept and appreciate who you are today. You can tell them about the you that used to be and share laughs about how your mom used to buy you size 12 shoes (for your size 8 foot). You can joke about wearing humongous glasses and over sized shirts and pants. But, with the laughter comes the understanding that those stories aren’t who you are. The stories reflect who you were. It’s a beautiful thing to laugh about those times without having to worry about those stories being used against you. Memories shared in laughter are wonderful. Memories shared in embarrassment are like a knife in the back.

Families, however, are still vitally important. If for nothing else, they are a reminder of what it meant to be someone different. They will remind you of where it is you come from and provide you with a healthy does of humility. Certainly something I need quite often. They’re also stuck with you. Friends can disown you or move on, but your family is pretty much stuck with you. For better or worse. Me? Worse, quite often.

Both our friends and families are vitally important to us. One affirms who we currently are while the other reminds us of where we’ve come from.

This entry was posted on August 17, 2007 at 11:02 am and is filed under General. 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.