“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.” - T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”, 1943
Last time, I wrote about establishing a vision for our family culture. Visions are good and necessary, but visions and goals are always in danger of always being visions and goals only.
But, when handled properly, the gift of vision is intention; the way to make it all real. I was once told by a great communicator and influencer that people only voluntarily undergo a change when they can satisfactorily answer two questions. It doesn’t matter how big or small the change is, these two questions are key:
Can I do it?
Is it worth it?
If they don’t believe it’s worth it, if they don’t believe they can do it, no change will occur, no matter how grand the vision. If you want to change your family culture, and thereby change your family, you’ll need to convincingly answer “yes” to both of these questions. Otherwise, there’s no point in trying.
But, you can do it and it will be worth it.
Progress
And so to get to “yes” on both of those questions requires a shift in attitude and outlook.
Those who worry about family culture or about having grandkids someday or about the wider world’s influence on their home, also tend to view themselves as “conservative” or “traditional” in some way. And I’m not talking about their politics necessarily, more on their outlook on life and choices. That being said, they may also see themselves as identifying with the rightness of some previous era of pop culture or values; or be concerned about the churn and change of moral progress. These are not “rock the boat” types usually.
But the problem is, in order for your family culture to survive, much less thrive, this conservative and traditional outlook on life and self must die.
We only have to go back a couple of generations to see the futility of this mindset. Think about how your parents lived at your age. Then think about how their parents lived at your age.
You are not the same. Vast, impassable chasms of change lie between you and just your grandparents. To say nothing of generations which came before them.
Very little of meaning and tradition has been conserved in the family from generation to generation. And so, you and I have never been (and never were) conservative or traditional in our family values; we floated down the river of progress just the same as everyone else. The best we can say is maybe we paddled against the current or floated a little slower than most from time to time.
The man who thinks himself a conservative or traditional is perhaps ironically susceptible to subversion and manipulation. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he just knows he doesn’t want to go there quickly. And that isn’t good enough today.
Whether or not we share DNA, our family lines share the same basic history and markers of “progress”:
the breakdown of extended communal and kin support and networks.
the overloading of burdens upon the shoulders of isolated nuclear families.
the cracking of isolated nuclear families under this pressure.
and finally, the exaltation of the individual over concerns and needs of family and community altogether.
Some of us are further along this continuum of “progress” than others, but none escape it.
Progress Of A Different Kind
It’s time to climb out of the river we’ve been floating down and trail blaze.
The mother and father who wish to press forward into the glorious vision of their family culture will not be conservative nor traditional. They do not have the privilege of being so. A life-sustaining, multi-generational, family culture in today’s alienated, post-apocalyptic environment will be the opposite of conservative. Instead, these parents will be risk-takers, experimenters, explorers, creatives, pioneers and innovators. They have the opportunity to create the things which will one day be conserved or considered tradition. If they can bother to log off TikTok long enough.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Over the years, I’ve quoted this T.S. Eliot poem and I’ll probably keep on quoting it as a sort of mantra. Because, it’s the hero’s journey. It’s our journey.
I don’t know the details of your family vision1, but regardless of the details, if you want to make it a reality, you must shed the conservative approach and adopt this exploratory mindset.
Embrace the Suck
I know I have a tendency to speak abstractly, so I’ll use a more current analogy for all the sports bros out there: The Alabama Crimson Tide Football Program.
Long considered one of the great, blue blood college football programs, Alabama spent more than a generation generally lost in the wilderness of football mediocrity. It would be understandable for a fan born in the 80s or 90s to think Alabama was nothing special when it came to football. Then in 2007, a man named Nick Saban became head coach. Saban was not like the other coaches who came before him. He was not conservative or traditional; he brought his own culture with him, which he referred to as “The Process” of proper training and execution. Shortly, Saban took a mediocre program and he won 6 championships in 15 years and played for 3 more; an unprecedented accomplishment in a sport known to change quickly and to spit out head coaches without mercy.
I admit, this might be a stretch, but Nick Saban is an explorer. He’s an innovator. He once said this:
“These guys, they all think they have this illusion of choice. Like I can do whatever I want to do. You have a younger generation now that doesn’t always get told no. So they have this illusion that they have all these choices. But the fact of the matter is, if you want to be good you don’t really have a lot of choices. It takes what it takes. You have to do what you have to do to be successful.”
If you want to bring your family culture into reality, it takes what it takes. And just like in football practices in the hot sun, what it takes is going to suck at least at first.
Explorers and pioneers know this; they know before they set out that they will endure both privations and inconveniences. Because if you want to settle a “new land”, it takes what it takes.
Back in my corporate days, I occasionally worked on Change Management projects. One tool we would reference was a “Change Curve.” Here’s a simplified version of it.
Recall that I said above that any change requires answering yes to “Can I do it?” and “Is it worth it?”. This is because of that dip in the change curve. Once the change starts there is always a period of pain, or as it’s labeled here, chaos. A “no” to either question and the change is quickly abandoned. Whether it’s starting a diet, a new exercise program, a new job, having difficult conversations, sleep or potty training a small child, or bringing about your desired family culture, there will come a time when you must embrace the suck, embrace the despair, pain and chaos which will arise from your decision to change. On the other side of that pain, is confidence and competence in whatever you hold dear for your family.
Reinforcements (Community)
A mentor of mine also taught me another Change Management framework called ADKAR which is meant as a tool to plan out a change before it happens, to ensure success. ADKAR means:
Awareness
Desire
Knowledge
Ability
Reinforcement
I will not bore you with a detailed explanation of all of these in this article, but here is a simple example. If you’re going to rearrange the furniture in your living room, you need to:
be aware of why the furniture should be rearranged
have a desire to rearrange it
know how to rearrange it
have the ability to rearrange it
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, you need a reinforcing structure to keep the furniture in its new spot.
Without that last element you may find it difficult to rearrange the living room, or after you move something, you find it moved back by someone else. Or you may find that after you move the couch, there’s no room for the coffee table.
I believe reinforcement in the context of family culture is two-fold:
A reinforcing family identity (which I’ll write about next time).
A reinforcing community of other families (which I write about all the time).
Nothing will help bring about the vision you have quite like exploring the frontier with other like-minded families.
Recently, a parent of my kid’s friends approached me with this question: “Could we come up with a shared phone/tech rule for our kids since they spend so much time together?”
Hmm, let’s check:
exploratory? yep!
will it suck? yep!
reinforcing family culture? yep!
Of course, I said I’d be on board with this.
If you’d like help working out the specifics of your family vision, I’d be happy to help.
An interesting article, and a lot of good stuff, but the definition of 'conservative' seems a bit equivocal.
Right/left, conservative/progressive are pretty useless terms. But one of the things that 'conservative' means in today's age is a return, not to the situation of the past, but the values of the past. So if you would rather have twelve human children instead of one 'fur baby'... that is considered a 'conservative' choice by the world. If you don't live together before you get married. If you stay married. If you go to church, pray, read your Bible... the world calls all of those by the name 'conservative'.