Thoughts on… Family and the image of the high-rise flats
This post is long overdue. It’s been sparked off by a conversation I had with a friend the other day but I had most of the ideas for it while trying to get off to sleep. It definitely seems like I have all my best ideas at around that time, hastily texting away into a sticky note on my phone. It’s also likely to be stuff I’ll expand on or take further at some point but let’s just get it all out there and see what happens. (Also, for full disclosure before I begin, I grew up in a house rather than a set of flats or apartments as shown in the featured image — more on that later)
Family
I don’t have a large family. Each auntie, uncle etc. has had between zero and two children but I lost all my grandparents by the age of about 9. When I was talking to a friend the other day, I felt very nonchalant about this. After all, it’s hard to miss something that you’ve essentially never had. Don’t get me wrong, the memories I have of older relatives are fond and cherished ones, but they are few and far between. I don’t have much of a memory for what happened early in my life and it takes a lot for those memories to be accessed and retrieved.
Alas, I didn’t have an adult relationship with any of my grandparents. I sometimes wonder what they would think of the person I’ve turned into. I know that I relate very differently to people now than I did a few years ago, never mind when I was a child. I would put this down to a mixture of growing up, life experience, my therapy training, and the path of personal/self-development I’ve gone on as a result. I also think that it’s unlikely my grandparents would be cut out for the modern world. I hear stories from people who still have grandparents about the un-PC and sometimes downright appalling things older people can come out with, perhaps because they don’t care or they know they can get away with it.
Little humans, intimacy and connection
I think there’s usually a vast difference between the relationships you have as a child and those as an adult. Having said this, I’m very conscious of trying to avoid viewing my niece and nephew as ‘kids’ and encouraging myself to see them as ‘little humans’. The terminology doesn’t do my ideas justice there — what I mean is that the connotations of ‘kids’ suggests immaturity, inferiority, and separateness to me, i.e. “I’m the adult and you’re the child”, “I have the power and I decide”. Except for very specific circumstances (e.g. the negative effect they’re having on other people, sometimes due to convenience), I try to relate to them in the same way as I do other adults i.e. with respect for their individuality and intrinsic worth as a person. I think this is crucially important — ‘little humans’ are not to be looked down on or seen as people to be bossed around or dictated to.
Moving on, I feel like having a small family tends to make things a bit more intimate on the whole. I have time for the majority of my family and I can safely say that I would do virtually anything for them. Having heard stories of great rifts, arguments and estrangement from others, I know that they are perhaps not so lucky with some of the family members they have. I think people sometimes forget that, especially when reaching adulthood, there is often an element of choice whether to keep in touch with family or accept them as part of your life. It’s also an assumption to think that losing family members is automatically a tragic thing — on the contrary, for many it is a relief.
That said, family members are similar to friends or acquaintances for me in that I have varying levels of connection to them and some I would more readily spend time with than others. I now think this is a perfectly natural part of life but I’ve previously tried to be completely equal to people which I’ve realised is both unsustainable and incongruent (you might potentially need to look up a counselling definition for that one, Google is your friend). There are some people that I simply don’t know that well and some that only have bit parts in the play that is my life. There is no callousness or insensitivity meant here — either we’ve just never shared things on a deeper level or we’ve grown apart over time.
High-rise flats
One final thing for this post and it relates to the closed-off, individual, often unknown nature of families. Let me explain. I heard a story I heard a few years ago with a picture attached similar to the featured image for this post of a high-rise block of flats or apartments at night-time. If you were to sit there staring at it for a while, no doubt you’d see lights flicker on and off. Each of those lights represents at least one life and many of those apartments contain families. Rather than focussing on lights going out (death), I was thinking about everything involved in that one light. There’s an individual story in each of them — dreams, pursuits, jobs, tragedies, emotions… life. I know nothing of them and they know nothing of me but for some reason, I love the thought of them all, carrying on day after day. In a block of hundreds of people, one person on their own can seem so insignificant, and yet they are all of the utmost significance…I’ll leave you with that.
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