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Forest and Tree

Reading this proverb today made me think about family in my life: 

The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.

The forest in case thinned a great deal over four generations. From having a dozen children, people went down to three or four. Then it was the time of the single child nuclear family by my generation. Most of my cousins are childless by choice or force of circumstance usually by way of very late marriage. The few of us who do have kids are the oddities of in our extended clan. I see my nieces and nephews who are married feel uninclined to start a family. 

What used to look dense from the outside four generations ago and housed the equivalent of a small village, is far more scattered in every sense now. We don't meet each other, don't live around each other and finally there is very few of us. No one looking from the outside in would mistake our collective for a dense forest. We are just a bunch of scattered and forlorn trees, looking for comfort and nourishment that the woods once afforded us. We have no strength in numbers and we certainly have no plans for posterity. 


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