Beauty in Contrast

 Hello everyone!

I feel that there has been some really cool information that I have noticed in the past few weeks of learning and I wanted to share some of those things with you. 

 I have been learning a lot this week about families and how family members work together to create a specific family unit. All families are different and I really believe that is a beautiful thing. Diversity and variations in this life are necessary for us to understand and appreciate the things that we love. Even with the understanding that I have of the importance of contrast in life, I still find things that are abnormal or different to be challenging for me to accept. For example, I have just learned about how each family has its own culture. Culture is the traditions, values, and beliefs that a group of people has that have been passed on for generations. Individual families have their own culture and this is something that I had never realized before now. The culture that my family has is so familiar to me and I find it hard to truly understand other family's culture at times because it is so different from what I have known my whole life. I also have found that some of the differences that I have seen in other family cultures have been amazing. I have seen many families that have certain beliefs, values, and traditions that I want to adopt and integrate into my own family. I find it so beautiful that we have the opportunity to choose and create our own family culture. 

A look into my family culture: 

First of all, my family is religious. All my family members are a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a family, we have always had our religious beliefs at the center of our identity. A lot of our values as a family have come from our religion and what it teaches. This is an aspect of my family culture that I love and want to pass on to my future family. My family has a lot of traditions that I believe have been passed on from my grandparents, especially around the holidays. I love those traditions and also would like to continue to have them as part of my future family culture. An area of my family culture that I would like to either change or not take into my new culture is our habits that I have seen in the past and sometimes present, with our communications. I will be the first to say that I am terrible at communicating. But I would also defend myself and say that I am trying harder to share what I am feeling. Growing up I honestly felt like I couldn't share a lot of what I was feeling in words. I don't know why this happened and if it is unique to me, but it is how I felt. Moving out of the house I have learned more about sharing my feelings and emotions. I have learned that you don't have to always respond with the answer "good," when someone asks how your day went. I want to have a culture of openness and respect for emotions and feelings. I want this culture to be a space where family members connect because they are sharing a deeper emotional side of themselves rather than connecting because they have judgments about other people either in or outside of the family. My professor said, "Stop talking about each other and start talking with each other." I loved this statement and I completely agree. He also said to, "share emotions rather than judgments." These are just all aspects of communication that I would like to try and work on myself and hopefully, this will translate into my current and future family culture. 

I hope that you all will analyze your own family and the culture that it has. We have such a gift at our fingertips. This gift is the ability to change our lives based on our choices. If there is an aspect of our family culture that we do not like, we can strive to change it. If we love the traditions and beliefs that our families have, then we have the ability to take those things into our future families. We can create a culture that includes the most amazing things. I appreciate the ability to choose and change and I hope that you all can see that you do have the power to change your and other people's lives.