Carving out Your Own, Fresh Family Traditions

Identifying with being an integral part of the LGBTI community in the modern day comes with a lot more insight than what one might anticipate. It’s about more than just being able to express oneself in the manner which comes to us most naturally with a lot more profound insight coming out of one’s mere existence as part of this community.

For any adult who forms part of this community at the moment, chances are you’ve had to fight for what you believe is right and it can’t have been easy growing up in a time when being gay was more widely considered to be taboo than it is right now. For those reasons the average gay person takes what I believe to be the correct approach to traditional beliefs, customs, values, etc, that being that you incorporate them into your life only as far as they are relevant to your own personal situation.

Don’t get me wrong or anything – I mean it’s good to have values which are based on basic humanity and to choose good over evil, but at some point along the transfer of these values down from one generation to the next, I really believe we tend to miss the point completely. People tend to focus more on protocols and how things should be done as opposed to why they should be done and why they’re suggested to be done in a certain way.

That’s also why I truly believe that while family traditions are important, they have to be fresh family traditions which are contributed to by the very members of the family who are tasked with upholding them.

So it’s important to carve out your own, fresh family traditions as a means through which to establish and maintain those all-important family bonds which really form the basis of enjoying a pleasurable, fruitful life, generally.

Build on existing traditions, by all means, but ask yourself just exactly why those traditions and customs exist. I mean in my specific case and with regards to the traditions surrounding weddings, is there no “father of the bride,” so who is going to pay for the wedding then?

That’s perhaps a very practical example which in a sense is dictated to by applying common sense to the dynamics involved, but the area in which I want to emphasise the point I’m trying to make is that concerning those traditions which are more of a choice than anything else and yet are practiced to such an extent that we find ourselves just going through the motions and not really knowing just why it is we hold on to these traditions.

In my household, we all love to have breakfast at a nearby farm every Sunday morning, for example, which is a freshly minted tradition on the back of the lot of us enjoying that experience on one occasion when we tried it out, including the family dog!

So enlist the “help” of each family member and have them contribute to carving out your own, fresh traditions.