When Traditions Don’t Hit Like They Used To
Breaking from tradition and adorning a very resilient house plant
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It’s the winter holiday season.
During this time of year (which coincides, grotesquely, with sick season and seasonal depression season) there are lots of obligations. Intense social and cultural pressure to be a certain way.
Things to do. Places to go. Expectations to fulfill.
There are variations on a theme for every person or family or community, of course, but generally I’m talking about traditions.
Tradition (noun): the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation, or the fact of being passed on in this way
Traditions, like everything in life, have many dimensions.
They can be fondly held and cherished. My personal favorites are hanging holiday lights, Friendsgiving, sending new year’s greeting cards, and gift exchanges with my college friends.
They can also suck. Especially when the traditions stay the same, mature to the point of rigidity and with no adaptation to the present context – but you’ve changed.
Before my child was born, my partner and I left Kansas City during most holidays to travel to our hometowns, which helped to preserve the traditions that our parents created in our childhood. After we became parents, we realized that this pattern was unsustainable. It wasn’t going to work for us anymore.
So, we changed the pattern. We started rotating holidays, including some holidays at home in Kansas City. We created a new holiday tradition that enables us to balance the preservation of tradition in our families of origin with the creation of new traditions in our chosen family.
It was a hard (mostly on the new grandparents), but it was necessary.
It was hard because it was a boundary, and boundaries can feel like walls.
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Here’s the truth: traditions exist inside human systems*. And we humans are a complex bunch.
A model for understanding why holiday traditions are sometimes awesome and sometimes suck.
Source: Human Systems Dynamics Institute
The study of human system dynamics is fascinating to me. In this model from Human Systems Dynamics Institute, we can see the simple core components of dynamic human systems: the container, the difference and the exchange. I love applying this lens to any human system as a way of understanding why things are the way they are, and what it might take to change them.
Holiday traditions are a container. A container is anything holds a system while patterns form…. like a family system, a network of friends or neighbors, or a faith community. Sometimes, you don’t know you’re in a container until something or someone nudges you up against the edge, and you start feeling around for openings.
The holiday family dinner table can be quite the container – the place where predictable patterns emerge year after year: Uncle is drunk again, Mom is not eating, Cousin is saying racist shit.
Have you ever had a moment where you wanted to call it out, ask what is wrong, take a stance against racism? That was an opening.
Within any container, there are remarkable differences between individuals – differences that make a difference. And those differences become more and more clear over time, as people’s true and authentic selves, needs and desires emerge. And sometimes those difference just don’t vibe like they used to.
If you, like me, are trying to be your true and authentic self in this season of traditions, you’re going to need some boundaries. Boundaries are an exchange when differences are no longer compatible or sustainable in the container - these may be differences in communication, or preferences, or beliefs. When set in healthy and generative ways, boundaries can be love, as Prentis Hemphill teaches us.
“Boundaries… are responsible, moveable, and highly dependent on real time assessments. Boundaries are how you guide and protect your life energy. The skillful use of boundaries allows us to create proximity, intimacy, and distance.
They give us the space to love and witness others as they are, even those who have hurt us. ”
When it comes to traditional patterns of the holiday season, they are often so baked into our most intimate containers that only boundaries can change the pattern.
This holiday season, you may need to do something different to alter the patterns that no longer serve who you are now and what you need now.
Feel for an opening. Do something radical. Something brave. Something hard but necessary.
-Kathryn
*(Let me also say that we can’t rule out the possibility that other living systems have traditions. Have you heard about what trees and mushrooms can do?!)