We Are Family

Life. You get up in the morning, brush your teeth, go to work, come back home, go to bed. So it goes on. Doing a bit of this and doing a bit of that. And through no real fault of your own a year passes you by. Life can be like that. On occasion, you make things happen, but more often than not things just happen to you. And in the process of time whizzing by it’s easy to lose track of "things"; things of substance. And in my case that includes our family spread across three different continents. But this summer, thanks to a little bit of planning, a fistful of air miles and a readiness for jetlag I managed to catch up with virtually all of my immediate family – one mother, two sisters, a brother and 5 out of 6 of the nephews and nieces. Quite a challenge. Social media can be a wonderful thing in terms of staying in touch but it's still only a poor relative to the real thing. It was great - talking to a very chatty teen nephew and niece about the world, no longer espousing their vows of silence; attending my niece's pre-school ballet class; listening as my nephew spoke with conviction about religion and his career situation; talking to my siblings and mother about our respective lives; introducing my partner to my sister and her family for the first time. It's good to reconnect with parts of your existence that matter as it's too easy to get caught up in every distraction under the sun.Hopefully it will happen again sooner rather than later.