It was a long weekend, but it was an enjoyable one. It’s been at least four years since I spent any real time with my extended family, and I missed them. It didn’t take long to get used to how much everyone had changed, but at the same time, most of them are the same still. Four generations of my family were gathered in one place, talking, joking, and remembering good times. It recharges the batteries and reminds you of a few things about who you are and where you come from. You can learn a lot about yourself from your family, especially when you have been hiding some parts of yourself for so long.

If you want to know your future, you have to know your roots.

I can see a lot of things about myself reflected in my family. Rather, I should say I see a lot of my family reflected in myself. It’s obvious to me that I am very much like my father: loud, boisterous, talkative. I don’t think I realize how much of an influence so many others have been. When you have so many people gathered together in one place with so much history, things come up. Stories that you can barely remember from your childhood, some stories you don’t remember at all and have a hard time believing. You can watch the kids doing weird things, like building a “crate” out of the sticks they’ve found laying around so that one of them (who is a lion at this point) can get transported to the zoo. The older kids and teenagers went off to the park to play baseball, and of course one of them got hurt. Now that I’m in my late twenties, I’m one of the people that sits out on the porch while my older cousins and siblings have joined our parents as being old people in the house.

You can look at four generations of your family gathered in one place, and you can see the phases of your life that have passed, and get an idea of where you’re going in the future. When I looked at my family this past weekend, I realized that if I can be in as good a place as the generation ahead of me, I’ll turn out alright.