Bill shook his head in disbelief. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to shout in anger or guffaw in stitches. His family had done it again. His family had done something all at once unimaginable and yet utterly predictable, given its astonishing peculiarities. Bill’s family had at once destroyed a precious, even sacred tradition but at the same moment replaced it with something of much greater value, if only for its hilarity and perfect oddity, so exquisitely representative of his weird and wonderful family. Bill would look back at the event years later, still shaking his head, still both ruing and celebrating the day. And yet, Bill wondered, how many more astonishingly authentic days like that unforgettable one would his family soon be reproducing?
Guidance
Does anything vitalize, comfort, and reassure you on the one hand, and yet on the other hand and at other times more trouble and unnerve you, than your own family? Families: can’t live with them and can’t live without them. Most of us would die for our families. Unfortunately, some of us do. That’s what makes guidance so valuable for surviving and maybe even improving and thriving in family life. One minute, you’ve got the best family in the world. The next minute, hold on tight because something’s definitely not right. Managing family life is little like flying a plane. The view from up there is out of sight. But it’s a long way down, and heading down quickly doesn’t take much. Your family may not need a psychotherapist or counselor. Yet maybe a little strategic guidance and clear thought would level the plane, make the ride a lot smoother, and help you keep your eyes on the gorgeous sun on the horizon. You’re making a good choice in seeking counsel. Keep your head on straight in family life.
Audit
To mix metaphors, this guide isn’t going to strip your family life down to the studs with the idea in mind of rebuilding it. You know your family. And you know that far too much is going on with your family, mostly good but some bad, not too hard but surely not easy, to think that you can control it. This guide’s role is instead to help you give your family life a little audit. An audit offers an accepted standard to help you compare your condition to the standard. Families are not all the same. Indeed, every family is different. Yet families do have healthy norms, reasonable expectations, valuable customs, and natural traditions. Those stable attributes can take many forms and find many expressions. The point is not to make your family look like any other family. The idea instead is to help your family find its stabilizing keel, guiding rudder, and organizing route. In their fundamentals, families have proportional patterns, suitable structures, and dependable dimensions. Read this guide as if holding up a template of sorts with which to measure your family’s progress and find opportunities to improve family life. See what you discern that might help you realize a better family life.
Desire
There’s certainly no shame in desiring to see your family do better. That desire is a large part of what drives many of us in daily life. Truly, why do you get out of bed in the morning, ready once again to take on the world? A large part of the reason is likely to see your family do well that day and then do better the next day. You know that if you didn’t rise with a degree of fortitude, purpose, and assurance, your family members wouldn’t do as well as they did yesterday when you were up on your feet to tackle whatever family needs and issues came at you. Your natural desire when rising each morning is likely to see your family do at least as well as they did yesterday, with the aim of seeing your family do even better tomorrow. As hard as one day of family life may be, with its illnesses, losses, hardships, bangs, and bruises, we still get up the next day expecting things to go better. And after a great day of family life, we rise the next day with the hope of having another great day, until a string of great days turns into a season of flourishing family life.
Growth
The thing about families is that they are organic. We are living beings, and our family is itself a living entity. But a family isn’t just living as its members live and breathe. A family is also growing, as its members inevitably grow. Younger members grow in body, height, strength, and maturity. Older members grow in insight, poise, wisdom, and experience. And the family grows in its capacity to survive, sustain, thrive, and adventure. Life isn’t on a plain or a decline. Life is instead up a mountain. Life constantly expands one’s experience and, with greater experience, expands one’s vision and capacity. The same is true, then, for the family. The family constantly grows in experience and, with greater experience, expands its vision and capacity. That growth is surely your desire for your family. If an individual isn’t growing, then they’re slowly dying. If a family isn’t growing, it slowly dies, too. You are willing to read a guide because you see the possibility for your family’s growth in strength, stature, and wisdom.
Renewal
You may also welcome a little guidance on family life because families must continually renew the vision that brings them life. When a patriarch and matriarch of a family pass on, they take with them the family’s wisdom, weight, and greatest experience. A family must renew what it loses with each generation’s passing. In a sense, the family itself passes with the passing of each generation, leaving a new family in its place, one that must resume garnering the wisdom, weight, and experience that will lead the family. The generation that had reached the mountaintop, from which they could see the promised land toward which a family continually strives, passed on to that land. The generation that follows it must finish its own ascent so that it, too, can see the promised land toward which to point the family. A steady ascent can take many guides. At this moment, you reached for this guide. Watch the direction in which it points you, toward the mountaintop.
Obstacles
You may also be willing to accept a little guidance because your family has encountered an obstacle along its path with which you could use some help. Families encounter obstacles, alright. You’ve probably experienced a few obstacles in your family already. Obstacles can have an external cause, things like an economic downturn causing a job loss or an international dust-up triggering a surprise military call up. Families can be great at responding to obstacles with an external cause. An external challenge can be the enemy that unites the family. Some families do best under those circumstances. Other families, though, may already be teetering when an external challenge arrives, knocking the family off course. On the other hand, internal challenges, like a long-simmering family feud borne of an unresolved offense, may not hit with the same hurricane force but can weaken the family’s foundation to a breaking point. Take no shame in getting help overcoming internal and external obstacles. Indeed, the quicker you get help, the quicker your family may be able to resume its steady progress up the mountain to its top.
Correction
You may also be willing to take a little guidance because you sense that your family needs a course correction. Truly, life is, or should be, a journey up. Each day should give each member of the family a little greater insight into the love that binds the universe, along with a little more strength and assurance, and a little more hope. The role of family leaders is exactly that: to keep the family on course moving up. On any given day, some family members may fall back, while other family members surge ahead. Yet overall, the family’s movement should be up. But sometimes, families aren’t moving up. They may instead be wandering circles on a plateau or, worse, may be creeping or even running headlong down. Your family has likely had those moments of spiraling down. And those are the moments when family leadership must reset the course. That’s also when you’re most likely to reach for a little guidance. A sound guide can call you back to the path upward.
Leadership
Families do have leaders, or they should. Families don’t always need drill sergeants. A well-coached and well-formed family should generally function without a lot of barked orders from members taking charge. But a family without leaders can quickly get lost. Some family members may lack the maturity and wisdom to see and stay the course. Indeed, some family members may be natural wanderers, born without a compass and instead letting every light breeze knock them completely off course. When a family has no leader, wanderers naturally take charge. Families properly tend not to leave their members behind. When no one leads a family, the family wanders after its wanderer. Families need leaders, which is another reason why you may have reached for this guide. You are your family’s leader or among its leaders. And leaders sometimes need guides.
Course
Families also need a course. The world into which our mothers bear us is purposeful. The universe in which we live carries meaning, a rationality and consciousness that we humans have the great gift of sharing. Yet meaning can only exist around purpose. Indeed, meaning is always archetypal. Meaning descends from the general above, and the ideal farther above that generates the general. Meaning descends onto the chaos of the earth, where we work to organize the earth around the descending meaning that fills our heads. And the greatest work we do is to guide and care for our families. We pour heaven’s meaning into the heads, hearts, and souls of our family members, when we set our family members on course for those heavens as our destiny. Yes, our course and our family’s course is up the mountain to its top, from which each succeeding generation passes on to the paradise that pours meaning down in loving rivers upon the earth.
Pointing
Yet that’s the thing about a guide. You should only follow a guide who has a sound sense of the right path up. You need a guide with a compass that knows the pull upward. You need a guide who has seen the North Star and can point it out. Everything you read in this guide should give you a sense of pointing out the direction up. For a family, as for an individual or community, that direction is a path of sacrificial love, of helping family members along the way, not just out of one’s surplus or excess but while pouring oneself into their life. Sacrifice is how the mountaintop pours down life into families, drawing them up. Do not read anything in this guide to suggest the opposite. Family leaders should not draw life out of the family, for that would not be the way up. Family leaders pour life into the family through their generous sacrifice.
Experience
A compass, though, is not quite enough to equip a guide. A guide also needs experience along the path. I’m writing this guide after forty years as a lawyer, with nearly half that time as also a law professor and dean. I mention law not necessarily because it makes for a principled way of guiding family life. I mention it instead because law practice gave me forty years of examining families under severe stress, with both external and internal causes. I represented families through illness, injury, and wrongful death. I also represented family members through infidelity, domestic abuse, separation, and divorce. I also helped a couple thousand pro bono clients on the streets and in community centers and churches, dealing with desperately broken family lives while trying to hold their families together against the world’s own brokenness. Yet I also represented families preparing to leave rich legacies for their loved ones and surviving family members who administered those rich legacies after the passing of loved ones. The brave and broken family members whom I helped taught me a lot about the path up. This guide honors their struggle.
Reflection
What family obstacle, opportunity, or event made you read this guide? Keep your family’s challenge, issue, or opportunity in mind as you work your way through this guide. On a scale from one to ten, how strong is your desire that your family prosper? Do you see your family as on an upward course of growth? Has your family recently lost elder members whose presence and wisdom informed and steadied your family? Do your family’s biggest obstacles have external or internal causes? Are those obstacles pulling your family together or apart? Do you sense that your family may need a course correction? Think of the wisest person you’ve known. Did that person give you the sense that they knew the upward course to a better life? Did that person have abundant experience observing and assisting both successful and struggling families and individuals?
Key Points
A little strategic guidance can help your family steady its course.
Use this guide as a template to audit how your family is doing.
Your desire to see your family do better fuels your daily drive.
Your family has the capacity to grow in strength and wisdom.
Your family needs renewal when each generation passes.
A guide can help your family get past external and internal obstacles.
A guide can help your family make course corrections on its path.
Your family needs your leadership to stay on course.
Follow guides who can show your family its upward course.
Experience can help a guide know the upward course.