Friday, August 27, 2010

Remembering and Propinquity

Propinquity is a new word for me. I learned it in a fascinating book I'm reading titled Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. The book itself, as it suggests, is about influencing people to change, and perhaps I'll blog about that another time. But for now, I want to focus on "propinquity". Aside from the fact that I just like the way it sounds, I've found myself thinking about this word quite a lot. Webster gives it two meanings: 1) nearness of blood, or kinship, and 2) nearness in place or time.

The authors suggest that we should consider propinquity when we look at our work and our home spaces. Remember when you were growing up and your family ate dinner together, watched TV shows together, hung out in the family room together? We had a lot of propinquity right? We maybe didn't want to be near to each other time, but we were. Family rituals, good and bad, happened around the kitchen table. The authors shared that dining room tables are disappearing from homes at an astonishing rate. They suggest that:
the dining room table is a significant facilitator of family togetherness and that when you do away with the table, families lose a large portion of family togetherness time.

What happened? Behold, the microwave. No longer do families need to spend time together preparing meals, they just warm it up, or pop the meal itself in, the microwave. Do your children have TVs in their rooms? More than likely yes. So, no more family time (or fights) about what to watch on TV. I think also, because more families have both mom and dad working, or, a single mom or dad, we just don't really want to put the time into the negotiations involved into finding a program that everyone wants to watch. We're tired and don't feel like making a meal that involves actual meal preparation, or waiting for your teenager to get home from soccer practice so you can all eat together. Even now, when my kids are gone, my husband and I don't eat at the table, instead we plant ourselves in our easy chairs and listen to the news. It's rather sad isn't it?

Do you know what made me think of all this? As I was sitting in my chair, waiting for my husband to come home from work, I heard a mom outside calling for her kids. That brought back such memories. When I was young, we didn't call up our friends on the phone, we went to their house, probably the back door, and called out their name. "Juuuu-lie" And her mom would call out, "Julie's not home right now", or "Julie, Barb's here". It seems almost comical now, but that's how we made plans with our friends. Of course back then (I sound so old), we didn't need to phone our friends, we could walk or ride our bikes to their house.

I don't know that I really have a point here, other than that you should strive to make the space in your home a space that invites propinquity--keep that dining room table and create kinship within your family and with your friends.