درسنامه اصلی

Roots – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ. Welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. Our topic, roots. Roots. Alienation. Atomization. A lack of connection. Do you feel this sometimes in your life? I have. I think most people in our modern world today experience these, these feelings. Alienation means separation. It means separation from, really, it means separation from everything else, right? It means you’re separated. The connection is broken between you and your society, your culture, humanity, god, family, all of this.

What’s interesting is that alienation, this feeling of being separated and kind of lost and not having meaning in your life, this is a common, common, common theme in literature, right? In novels, in books, starting especially in the 20th century.

If you look at English literature, meaning English language, so American and British, you’ll see that this theme, this idea of alienation, of lacking meaning, of not feeling that there’s meaning to life and lacking a connection to culture, family, god, all of this, it really becomes powerful when you look at writing in books and everything.

It becomes very, very powerful starting in the 20th century, 1900. It can go back even earlier, but especially then with the industrial revolution, we see it become super powerful and it’s probably the number one theme in modern writing, good literature.

Atomization, atomization means isolation, right? It means that again, it’s a symbol or idea of everything’s broken up into tiny, tiny little pieces. So our societies have become atomized. It means like before, right, you…in the past, I don’t know, 100 years, 50 years even some places, people were connected more. First of all, people had large extended families.

You typically lived with or near your extended family, not just mom and dad but mom, dad, brothers, sisters, and also grandparents and also uncles and aunts and cousins. And all of these people would live sometimes in the same house but at least in the same town. So automatically you got this strong feeling of connection because you had this very large family and all these people that you were connected to by blood.

And that is not common anymore, at least not in the United States. In the United States, people move all over the place and they…they aren’t close to their extended family. Yes, they’re close to their mom and dad, brothers and sisters, usually, but not grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and nieces and nephews. So everyone kind of moves and they’re all separated, atomized. It means everyone’s just kind of alone and individual.

And this is also true if we look back in the past where people were more connected to their neighborhoods, right? To a location and the people in that location, where people would talk to their neighbors, maybe have dinner with their neighbors, maybe go out and do things with their neighbors, have little parties, neighborhood festivals, all of this kind of stuff. You knew who your neighbors were. You talked to them. Again, so you weren’t all separated and alienated. There was a deep connection.

And finally, because of those extended families especially, in the past people had more of a connection, a stronger connection to the past, to their ancestors. Your ancestors are the people in your family from the past, so your, certainly your parents and then your grandparents and your great-grandparents, going back, back, back. Those are your ancestors. And there was much more of a connection to ancestors. Again, because you had extended family together so at least you had three generations, sometimes four generations living near each other.

So we’ve lost most of that in most places in the world that I visit, and I’ve been in Asia, I’ve been Europe and, of course, North America, and Central America, and I see that these connections are getting weaker and weaker. Now some places it’s better than others. America’s probably one of the worst, perhaps the worst where the alienation, the atomization, the separation is so terrible in the United States.

And that is terrible because without that, we have no roots. Those are our roots. Right, when we talk about roots, this idea of roots with people, we’re talking about connections, strong connections that make us feel part of something bigger, not just alone, not just ourselves, not just one, or even not just a couple people. But part of this whole large community, at the very least, a large family.

And when you have all those connections, you feel more peaceful. I mean, this is human nature. We are social animals. This is just part of our core nature, our central nature. So we feel much more peaceful and happy when we have these deep roots, these strong connections with many, many, many people, many generations and even a location, a place and the people there.

We have a stronger feeling of identity. We know who we are, right? I mean we know individually who we are but we are also part of this group or these groups and these places. And because of that, when we have that peacefulness, when we have those roots, we are naturally more confident. We don’t feel alone in the world. We have greater strength and confidence. That’s why roots are so important. And it’s important that we try to get them back again, make them stronger.

Now this was very important to me. As an American, I felt rootless, y’know, without roots. And I think a lot of Americans, this is very common in America, in the United States. Because in America, people

move all over the place and they don’t stay connected to their extended families. And because of…I was the same. So my extended family, my big family lived in Indiana and on my dad’s side they lived in a place called Massachusetts, up near Boston.

But my parents, they moved. They moved a lot, in fact. They moved to Florida, then North Carolina, Virginia. I moved around a lot as a kid. So number one, y’know, I love my grandparents, my extended family. I would see them at holidays but only once a year. And so in my normal everyday life I never saw them, almost never.

And then with my family also, even just my mom, dad and sister, we moved every few years. We moved to different places. So I felt like I had no connection to any place. I had a weak connection to my extended family. And the culture, I didn’t really have much of a connection to the culture. I felt rootless like I was, kind of, just alone. Just me and my small nuclear family, dad, mom and sister.

And so I had this strong craving. I wanted a feeling of roots. And I wanted to know more about my family, for example, the past. Where did they come from? Where did they used to live? What were they like? What were my great-grandparents like? What were my great-great-great-grandparents like? Where did the family come from because I knew they came from Europe somewhere.

And I wanted this so much. I desperately needed a connection to feel like I had some kind of roots. And actually, what was great is that when I was, I don’t know, in my 20s, my grandmother on my dad’s side, my grandmother, actually started doing genealogy. Genealogy is the study of genes, if you look at it, right, genetics, DNA. But what it really means is the study of your ancestors.

Genealogy, it means study of your ancestors. So it’s finding your family tree back, back, back as far as you can. And my grandmother, she went very far back. She went back, I don’t know, 3, 4, 500 years. She found the history of my family, the Hoge family. And she also did some of her own family. And so I found out where my ancestors came from.

They came from, going back, we know definitely they came from Scotland. We have the names, the graves, she visited Europe. So I know that they came from Scotland. They used to be called the Hages, and then the name changed when they came to the United States. I know that my family started in the United States before the Revolutionary War, before the war of independence. So my family has been in the United States for a very long time.

And somehow, just knowing all of this gave me a little more of a feeling of having roots, of knowing where my family came from. And also I found out that her family, that another big part of the family came from Denmark. So I don’t know, that gave me an interest in Scandinavian culture. Scandinavia is Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland maybe, too.

See, we need roots. We need this because in life we kind of have two different needs. One is certainty, a feeling of connection and certainty. And on the other hand, we also need variety and growth. So variety and growth, that’s gone out. That’s traveling, that’s…if you think of a tree, that’s like the tops of the trees, growing, right? The top of the tree grows, grows, grows, new experiences, new, new, new, different, learning, learning, learning.

But we also need roots. Roots in connection, tradition, certainty. We need both. Children especially need this. See, if you have a child of any age, and if you just constantly, if you move them around all the time and they don’t have connection with extended family, they have no connections at all, no roots. They will not be so happy, right? It gives them a feeling of being unsafe, even if they’re not in danger. It just gives them a feeling of unsafe, unsure. It will lower their confidence.

But when you have a child who has strong roots. They’re living maybe in a…they’re living of course with their family and their parents are still married and then the extended family is all around, maybe a big extended family of uncles and aunts and grandparents. And they’re living in a neighborhood where people know each other really well.

And they have a strong feeling of connection to their culture, to their society and they know about their ancestors. All of that gives them a very strong feeling of roots and that makes them much more confident. They will grow up being much more confident. And as adults, we also need this and it will also help our confidence.

So you’ve got to think of it in life. We need those roots, the certainty, the connections, the traditions, those traditions that we are connected to from our long, long ago past, in our culture, in our families. That gives us tremendous confidence, a feeling of stability and peace. And then with that stability and peace, we can then grow, grow, grow, grow and go get, y’know, new experiences, new people, new places, all of that, with much more confidence.

So this month, what are you going to do? I want you to get out there and learn more about your roots and make your roots stronger. Number one, do some family research, family research, genealogy. Find out where’s your family come from if you don’t know already. Right, try to find out going back with your

ancestors, where are your ancestors from? How far back do you know? How many years or even centuries do you know your family? Where did they come from? What were they like?

Another way you can do this, if you have older relatives, grandparents or even uncles and aunts, talk to them. Ask them about the family. Ask them about each other, right? Because sometimes we don’t know about our own family members. It’s kind of interesting to hear stories about your own family. It’s interesting for me to hear an uncle or an aunt tell a story about my mom or my dad, right?

Because my mom and dad don’t tell me these things so I get to learn a little more about my parents when my uncles and aunts tell stories about them, and my grandparents tell stories. I still have two living grandmothers and they tell a lot of stories. And so, just talk to the older people, or even just the other people, even cousins. Talk to them in your family. Learn more about your family. That will strengthen your roots. And make the effort to connect more with your extended family.

Number two, place. Create a stronger connection to where you live, wherever you live. Learn about the local history of your town. Right, see if you can do research. You can go to the library. You can go to the Chamber of Commerce or government. You can try to find books, but learn about the town and the region, the area where you live. Learn more about it, going back as far as you can. Learning about it, knowing that history of the place can create stronger roots there, a feeling of connection.

Likewise, talk to your neighbors, especially older neighbors, okay? People who are older and have been in a place a long time, they have a lot of stories and they love to tell stories, so take time. Talk to some of your older neighbors. If you see them at a park, if you see them walking around, say hello. Let them tell you stories. It’ll increase your feeling of connection, of roots.

And finally, teach all of this to your children and to your nieces and nephews, the younger generations. Teach them so they have this same feeling of being connected, of having roots. Help them grow up feeling stronger and more confident because they have those strong roots. Alright, strong roots give you that strength and confidence to grow bigger and bigger, more and more.

Have a great month. See you next time. Bye for now.