Values to keep and values to tweak:
What big family gatherings can teach us
At a 104-person reunion of my husband David’s family in a small town outside of Prague this past weekend, I was overcome with a desire for more of this in my life. But what exactly is “this”? Asking myself that question led to a conversation I’d never had before with David about family values, including those we want to pass down to our daughter.
The weekend was a testament to the power of coming together—the good will was palpable in a room full of mostly strangers from different countries, speaking different languages. But what stood out to me most was a single line spoken by one of the organizers.
“Hard work, persistence, and caring,” he said. “Those are what define our family.”
“Also good farmers.”
At least in the States, we don’t often focus on family values passed down through generations. I haven’t given conscious attention to the values that I’d like to pass down from my family, let alone David’s.
The spoken values we can learn from family gatherings matter, but unspoken ones may be even more interesting. The love of organizational tools I see in David each day was on full display in the color-coded family tree and nametags handed out to each guest.
Career and financial success was a prime topic of conversation over the course of the weekend—another unspoken family value. A twelve-year-old family member said she loved art and science but didn’t think she could make art a career. “Why not?” I asked. “Because you don’t make enough money in art,” she answered. There it was, the family value placed on financial success in action. “How much money is enough?” David asked. “Average,” she said. And we got to talking about different ways to make an “average” amount in the arts. I told the story of my mom becoming a fiber artist to her dad’s deep chagrin, supporting herself by teaching fiber art for 36 years while making beautiful work in her spare time (and now full time in retirement). In doing so, she challenged family norms. She claimed a new family value that she then passed along to me.
We don’t need to pass everything down. We can pick and choose.
But we can only pick and choose after we have first given some thought to what our values are. And a big family gathering can be a prime opportunity for reflection.
In our conversation after-the-fact, David and I talked about the values we want to pass down to our daughter Noa. Hard work, persistence, and caring—things that made the good farmers from which we are both descended—are on our list.
The biggest value tweak we came to is this: shifting from a focus on financial success to a focus on creative living. Creative living doesn’t mean, “You must be an artist.” Neither David nor I has a (day) job traditionally thought of as creative. He’s an economist, and I’m a lawyer. But we have both found that when we focus on how we can be creative in our work and add value to the lives of those we work with, we are much more satisfied than when we focus on financial success. We have made decisions in the jobs and companies we have chosen to put a premium on creating rather than maximizing pay.
Creativity as a family value doesn’t necessarily mean doing different work, but it does mean working differently.
This is the most important value we hope to pass on to Noa. Understood better now after reflecting on where we’ve come from as a family—and where we are headed.