Our Traditions

Have you ever wondered why we repeat certain events, not for the first time, but in repetition; or perhaps wondered why it feels so comforting to see life repeat itself in even the smallest of ways. Why does one serve a certain kind of stuffing for the Thanksgiving Turkey? Why do we save memories of our parents waking us on Christmas morning and want our kids to wake-up the same exact way. Why do we find comfort in seeing a mannerism that resembles her mother, such as crossing her legs a certain way. We observe the daughter pretending she’s putting on lipstick, with her lips all puckered up; she smiles into her upward facing hand in which has miraculously become the compact mirror. We notice the added steps a son adopts when throwing a baseball exactly as his father does with the exaggerated wind-up and kicking the mound. Although the son has no idea why these additional actions are needed, he adds them to his throwing technique as though they were a necessity. Maybe this son grows up and desires the same career as the father and his father before him.
We pass on traits from one generation to another subconsciously and are shocked and amazed that this descendant has stolen an attribute belonging to an elder like a pick-pocket in Times Square who is stealing from a tourist. Just as a vacationer would be unaware of this form of thievery so would are the parents. This truth is hard to accept when it involves negative traits. A father doesn’t want to believe his son takes a blue color job because he thinks his father would be proud of him. The mother doesn’t want to believe her daughter is abusing her children because that was the way she was taught. It’s ironic that this daughter harbors negative feelings for her mother’s style of childcare but will repeat this harsh treatment with her children. Because a family member is going down a road that another family member went down, we all assume he will end up at the same place, even if that place is not where we would like him to go. We let him go, because at least the road is familiar to us. We hope he’ll kick the same stones, jump over the same puddle, and go exactly the way someone else went before him.
I still feel so comfortable going down a dead-end street in my old neighborhood. Knowing it’s going nowhere; I would just drive down and try to remember my childhood. Sometimes I would even try to find specific things that would fly me back to those days, like a certain tree, or a crack in the road that I felt on my bike. One day, the road was closed for construction and a few weeks later I was back, this time to find the road no longer a dead-end, but a shortcut to a major highway. I knew that this was a good idea. I knew it made perfect sense and should have been done a long time ago, but I did not want it to happen.
I supposed if we were apes on the Discovery channel, someone would say that a few of our actions are instinct mysteriously passed on from one generation to another. When our knowledge or education just is not enough and survival takes over, that’s when a doctor would say this must be instinct. But what would they say if we chose to ignore knowledge and education in order to keep doing things that make us feel comfortable, like the doing things that our parents did and their parents before them. I’m sure they would say this is not survival am may actually say this could be suicide.
We find things like this everyday. It is now very well known that if you come from a smoking family, you are very likely to smoke yourself. Smokers will explain the feeling they get when they smoke is like a feeling of relaxation or being very comfortable. Doctors have also proven that drinking is genetically related. That we could actually have a gene passed on from one generation to another with this thirst for alcohol.
In the dictionary you will find the meaning of Tradition: The passing down of elements of a culture, mode of thought, or behavior, followed by a people continuously from generation to generation. A set of such customs and usages viewed as a coherent body of precedents influencing the present: followed family tradition in dress and manners.
Traditions make up so much of who we are. We keep these traditions alive as if somehow it is keeping the person who gave the tradition to us alive. We pass traditions from one person to another without even a thought on the subject, simply because it reminds us of someone we love very much, or it brings us back to a certain time when we had these people in our lives. We also keep traditions because we don’t know or don’t want to know any better and hate to believe that any of these traditions should never have been given to us.
It wasn’t until I went back home to bury my grandmother when I realized that so much of what we do, how we think, how we act, and why we go down certain roads is not something we would call traditions, but that is exactly what it is. In my grief I realized my grandmother died because of traditions that were passed onto her, things that, because of traditions, could not be let go or forgotten. Maybe she thought if she were to let go some of these traditions she would also be letting go of the people she loved the most. I am sure this way of thinking was given to her as a gift of traditions and as a good mother should, she passed those traditions on to her children.
I saw my grandmother in my Aunt Grace for the first time. I saw my aunt embrace my grandmother’s traditions as if she were embracing my grandmother. I am sure she felt comfort in that because I felt comfort in that. I too realized I wanted to hold on to anything I could of my grandmother, because now she’s gone. Traditions are easier to hold on to, they don’t take up that much space, and you can get a lot for little or no money.