FAMILY

 

 

Family is usually defined as one’s blood relatives. Your family can make you smile; they can cheer you up when you are down. Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, once said, “Let us make one point, that we meet each other with a smile, when it is difficult to smile. Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family.” Families can bring smiles to each other, and this happiness will spread to friends and beyond. However, families are together whether there is happiness or sadness. Buddha once stated, “A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another, the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another, it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden.” Buddha is stating that family is a place, and the core of this place is a loving attitude, for without that, disharmony can grow, causing the place to crumble and fall apart. Family is an important place for people to bring happiness to each other.

However, family does not necessarily have to be only people related by blood; family can also include your friends, your neighbors, and your whole community. Richard Bach, an American writer stated, “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” His definition of family tells us that people do not have to be related by blood in order to respect and be happy with each other, acting as a family. These people who help you and respect you take on a new identity, one as your family. Similar to Buddha’s idea of the garden, the whole community you live in can be related to the close relationship of family. When the community falls apart, so will the relationship of each and every one of the community’s members. As Mother Teresa said, the family will bring smiles to each other, which will pass on to strangers. These people will become accustomed to this idea of a large family and pass it on. Perhaps the whole world will achieve peace and unity because of this core idea of family.

Richard Bach is telling us that people do not have to be related by blood in order to respect and be happy with each other. Relating to Buddha’s idea, Bach stresses that the true family is made up of the ‘flower garden’, those people who volunteer to be friends and forge a new identity together; rarely, he says, are these communities formed by the biological group of a father, mother, and siblings.  The quote is showing that family can be found anywhere, among like-minded and loving friends. In Mother Teresa’s world, this family can still bring smiles to each other, and in fact, as we grow and leave our nuclear families, each one of us has a chance to achieve the wisdom contained in all three quotations.