The actions we undertake daily and seem to be such ‘little things’ we do in our everyday life, go further than we anticipate in solidifying or weakening the relationships in families. At the end of the track they proof to be very important and a necessity to have been structured in solid clay.
Many may think that annual family vacations have to be going abroad and that we all have to be partakers of worldly traditional feasts, like Christmas celebrations and Valentine’s Day gift-giving practices which have become integral consumption rituals in contemporary families. These man made artificial celebrations are no guaranty to family happiness. It is a wrong idea to think a family can not be happy when it does not celebrate Christmas, Easter or any other heathen or so called Christian feast.
Those who want to keep to God’s Will and as such abstain from the heathen feasts like Halloween, Christmas, Easter, still can enjoy very happy moments together. All the material presents may be very nice surprises with bring joy, but they also can be given at other moments. And all family members should be aware that it is not the material which brings happiness, but the feeling of being together and sharing a happy time with each other.
We have been socialised by media, family and other social institutions to dedicate more attention to these rather conspicuous consumption experiences and have gradually become less concerned of the importance of the mundane, everyday consumption behaviour to our relationships and overall family wellbeing.
In many families we can see that parent buy their children. When divorced and one parent gives something the other parent want to give something more expensive and bigger.
we fail to recognise and appreciate the underpinning significance of these frequently taken-for-granted consumption experiences to happiness, satisfaction and stability in our family relationships. Instead we seek to construct family bonding through perhaps rather superficial, conspicuous consumption acts such as buying expensive gifts for loved ones, committing to elaborative annual family holidays and following extensive Christmas rituals.
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Preceding articles:
Families with four or more kids most happiest
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Additional reading:
- Self-development, self-control, meditation, beliefs and spirituality
- Focus on outward appearances
- Being Religious and Spiritual 8 Spiritual, Mystic and not or well religious
- Holidays, holy days and traditions
- Thanksgivukkah and Advent
- Autumn traditions for 2014 – 6 Bonfire night
- Halloween custom of the nations
- Autumn traditions for 2014 – 1: Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet
- Christian values, traditions, real or false stories, pure and upright belief
- Why we do not keep to a Sabbath or a Sunday or Lord’s Day #3 Days to be kept holy or set apart
- A season of gifts
- Irminsul, dies natalis solis invicti, birthday of light, Christmas and Saturnalia
- Wishing lanterns and Christmas
- Christmas, Saturnalia and the birth of Jesus
- God’s Special Gift
- Christmas customs – Are They Christian?
- The Evolution Of Passover–Past To Present
- Who Celebrates Easter as Religious Holiday
- Eostre, Easter, White god, chocolate eggs, Easter bunnies and metaphorical resurrection
- Easter: Origins in a pagan Christ
- 14-15 Nisan and Easter
- 14 Nisan a day to remember #4 A Lamb slain
- Easter holiday, fun and rejoicing
- Not bounded by labels but liberated in Christ
- Seven Bible Feasts of JHWH
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Related articles
Tag Archives: Going on holiday
Family happiness and little things we do
Filed under Lifestyle, Re-Blogs and Great Blogs, Religious affairs, Social affairs
Going on holiday is… silence in your head
An average Westerner lives in his head. From kindergarten until university he is indoctrinated with the idea that there is an answer to every question and a solution to every problem. In this way his need to understand and control keeps the illusion alive that we have a grip on our reality and have everything under control.
But nothing is further from the truth.
In his book ‘De Schaduw van de Verlichting” Eddy Van Tilt speaks about ‘the over-drive of rationality‘.Because we give our ratio absolute status , we have become estranged of that part of reality that is not rational and with which we have lost touch.
The psychologist Van Tilt asks :
” What happened that caused the heads of Westerners to become so hard and their hearts so weak?”
Because he is confronted with the pathological results of too much ego, the delusion of manipulability and rationalising.
The psychiatrist Mark Epstein reacts to this as follows :
‘our thinking mind is compulsive, because it does not want to forget or be forgotten and therefore always has something to do’.
That is why it will not be easy to ” let go of everything” on holiday.
Because as hungry and restless as our mind is preoccupied with the past and the future, it will need other kinds of stimuli, in order not to forget or be forgotten.
We can put our mind at rest.
In the first place by keeping our heart open, by simply observing what happens inside ourselves and by reconnecting with our body, our surroundings, and by accepting …to be moved. When we enter silence, we will experience “now” and not so much hearing it, but rather feeling it or even better …. experiencing it.
To obtain this , it is not necessary to leave your ego or anything else behind, but to look past its borders.
‘By standing still we do not see new things, but we look at things in a different way’,
is what C.G. Jung concluded once.
Or how going on holiday is mainly… silence in your head and heart.
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Preceding:
Summerholiday season time to read the Bible
Home-stayers and their to do list
Written by inspiration of God for our admonition, to whom it shall be imputed if they believe
Dutch version / Nederlandstalige versie: Vakantie is… stilte in je hoofd
Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, C.G. Jung, A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sándor Ferenczi posed at Clark University, Worcester, Mass. Photograph first published in September 1909. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Additional reading:
- Be still and listen
- Control and change
- Control your destiny or somebody else will
- Malefactors becoming your master
- Patience is the ability to count down before blasting off
- He who smiles rather than rages is always the stronger
- Know Who goes with us and don’t try to control life
- A Living Faith #7 Prayer
- Praying is surrendering in all circumstances
- Giving cogent reasons to young people why Christian faith is relevant to them
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Further reading:
- Rationalisation
- I’m proud of me
- Day 300: Rationalising Not Buying Anything
- Day 552 (or 1 Year, 6 Months, and 7 Days of Continuous Sobriety)
- When We Shouldn’t – And Should – Argue from Authority
- Hofstadterisms
- Why imagination is great (and why many evangelicals don’t like it)
- People focus on what they can see
- An Artifact of Our Time
- Are biases deviations from the mean?
- Do we really live in the Age of Empathy?
- Excellent. With musings on religion and mass extinctions.
- Rationality as a Social Process
- Illogical Rationality
- Sam Harris’s War on Rationality
- The Image of Objectivity
- Looking at the world through the eyes of others
- Relapse
- Working toward a new paradigm
- Does your brain know what’s best for you?
- Effective Altruism: the global movement that combines your heart and your head
- Animal rationality
- Do irrational idiots exist?
- The Grasshopper and the Ant – a story of economic rationality
- Maybe Everyone Is Actually Super Rational!
- Note: Misconceptions on Understanding
- Too many decisions can be exhausting.
- How to make the best decisions you can
- Rationality over the long term
- Desperate for a “Pause”
- “Time to take out the trash”
- It doesn’t always stand to reason
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