The Weekly Rhythm #5: What makes up OUR family culture?

Welcome to the Weekly Rhythm!

Last week, we began talking about culture. As a refresher, Oxford Languages defines culture as the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. 

This week, I’ll share with you some of the aspects that make up my family culture. This isn’t for the purpose of making your family culture look like mine. Rather, I want you to see actual elements that make up a distinctive family culture for the purpose of you being able to identify elements that make up your own family culture.

These are things that are already present. You do have a family culture. So what makes that up? Here’s elements of ours.

• Rhythms of church on Sunday and Wednesday. Family night of Thursday.

• Education. My wife homeschools our kids and I’m a college instructor. There are frequent conversations about school subjects, curriculum, and teaching methods.

• Reading. This may go along with education, but we are a home full of readers. All of us. There are book shelves in nearly every room of our house. Remember: it’s not hoarding if it’s books.

• The table. Our dining room table is the central point in our home that we do nearly everything around.

• Time together. We love spending time together whether its playing board and card games (and keeping a log of it), listening to records, eating meals, working on projects, visiting grandparents or having grandparents visit us, going for hikes, taking care of plants, learning to garden, etc. We’ve found several things that we all like and make an attempt to draw each other into them.

• Analog. This is a bit of an odd one because it operates in the background of the others. Though we do not do away with digital things like TV, video games, or music streaming, we do try to emphasize analog activities. Board games and vinyl records would fit in here. One heavy way we work to cultivate a love for writing is by using fountain pens. Digital notes aren’t taken so much, but there are notebooks with fountain pens and colored inky fingers everywhere.

Many of these things will overlap. The activities will become rhythms that happen over and over. The relationships we build will feel the overlap of this culture as we interact.

Some families will be blue collar and some will be white collar. Some families will have a heavy culture of homesteading and healthy living. Some families will be heavily into the arts. There have been families I’ve met that had amusement parks as part of their culture. Without going too far down this rabbit hole, there are also families who have a toxic culture and cultivate a stagnant nothingness at best or complete relational devastation at the worst.

Our family culture is the unique blend of each of it’s members, practices, preferences, and rhythms.

For you to think about this week:

1. If family culture were on a sliding scale of thriving on one end and dying on the other, where would your family land?

2. Last week, the activity for you was to have a conversation about the practices of your family that make up its culture. What is one positive aspect that you would want to start intentionally building your family culture around?

For you to act on this week:

1. Lets interact this week! After you think about #2 above, reply to this e-mail and let me know what the positive aspect is that you came up with. I’ll feature your topic (keeping you anonymous!) in an upcoming edition of the Weekly Rhythm as well as discuss some ways to cultivate the practice for the good of your family.

That’s it for this week! Don’t forget to reply to this e-mail with one sentence describing the positive aspect you’d like to grow in your family culture.

Talk to you soon!

~ J.P.

PS: You’ll get to know me more as this newsletter continues. Knowing and being known is a big thing for me. Introduce yourself by replying to this e-mail (it’ll go right to me). Let me know what has and has not worked for you when it comes to rhythms.