All too soon the time is fast approaching for us to repack our suitcases into the car for the journey home, back to our relative but different normality. As I described it it's been a gathering of the clan, a clan which is different each year, some of us growing older and more infirmed. Some with the rigour of a new baby to watch over 24/7 and for Andrew, a return to a far different surrounding as he swaps continents and returns to a very different life in India.
Families all over the world these days are faced with the same problem, the world being the oyster the pearls which grow do so under different conditions and the cohesion when living in the same street, or an adjacent town is lost as we are left contemplating a further period of separation.
The rooms will be tidied the rubbish of a week thrown out, a final saunter around the town and we will be off, this time the optimism of arrival only a few days ago is now tinged with regret.
Gathered together we made a healthy but divergent group. Having grown in the interim into different roles we test our understanding of what is happening, the old getting older, the birth of a delicate needy baby re-emphasising the cycle of life and the genetic continuity and amongst all this, the voice of sagacity, a philosophical proposition which maps out a path for a more harmonious life through the understanding of Buddhism.
The family glue which relied on the conformity of our past experience is, in someways weakening, in some ways strengthening the bond between us but where as before the family nucleus gained its strength from the necessity to get on and interact under one roof, now the roofs are split and each generation is generating its own energy shifting the tectonic plates, a little further apart. The importance of renewing that family glue is ever more important since distance erodes the bond which came into being such a long time ago. The ability to communicate and laugh together is made easier through the video links but as with all such artificial creations it's what is said and done off screen that matters. The worries which the young have for their parents as they see them lose much of the strength and the mental agility and made them reliable. The tensions which a new born child fosters on the new parents, the tiredness and apprehension as the child is put under the spotlight each day as the phenomenon of a growing baby unfurls is out of sight to the rest of the family and generally unspoken. The common sense of an older generation is supplanted by new and more relevant information and becomes a difficult bridge to negotiate.
The world of intense social and philosophical interpretation widens the old sureties, sureties based on assumptions which were never tested but which are now part of an ongoing dialog of debate. Barely questioned ideas are given a thorough reexamination using the centuries old debating skills and one is hard pressed not to undergo the total ignominy of having to cast out ones own sureties.
Clearly it's a rich organic mix which is departing, soon to go it's own way. It's not a tame organic mix or a set of woolly assumptions but a work in progress and when we are all once again settled 'back home' we might look back wiser on the circumstances of our now widely differing lives.
The glue is still firmly in place as we sometimes squirm to modify our interrelationship but nature, and life carry us indubitably onwards to our different destination, et fruit semper, et est vita.
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