Reviewing Your Values: Have You Unknowingly Destroyed Your Family?

In the world of opportunities, careers, friends, celebrities, parties, money, sex, internet, traveling and personal growth -- where does the family fit in?

Well, the truth is that in most of the Western countries, including my own -- it really doesn't. For many people and even for most of my friends -- family comes as one of the last. OK, a girlfriend or a boyfriend might take the first position for a while, but overall -- going out with friends comes before a family dinner, getting a good career comes before having a baby, having fun comes before building a lifelong partnership.

Well, the key to the happiness truly lies inside, so pleasing your family is not the key to liberation. Yet life is all about balance -- I sense that our values are dangerously out of balance when it comes to family. Instead of seeing this as an asset and find a healthy relationship with it, we rather tend to isolate us from the family and run away fast when problems or demands arise.

How Are You Feeling Today? No, I Mean -- HOW Are You Feeling Today? Seriously...

"How do you feel?"

"I don't know. I feel good."

Ah, I hear it much too often. Till recently I was saying this much too often. When it comes to feelings most of us Northern people use a rather simplistic approach. We tend to have two categories: GOOD and BAD. The more advanced ones of us add perhaps ANGER, FRUSTRATION and BOREDOM, the ones in love add LOVE, which becomes GOOD a few years down the road into the stable relationship...

Perhaps too simplistic from my side, but there are thoughts to consider.

Got me thinking again today when I was watching a TV-show where a sweet elderly woman was trying to explain how she felt when she found out that her beloved family member could have been killed in the earthquake at Haiti. You could see from her eyes the intensity of her feelings: the fear, concern, desperation, love, hope and guilt all mixed together. Yet she had only a few words to express her inner world: worried and hopeful.

She just didn't have words to describe what she felt.