I don’t know about your family but when it comes to my own it’s amazing how similar yet different we all are. I’ve given this a lot of thought and the only metaphor for explaning it that makes sense to me is that we are like varieties of fruit inhabiting the same fruit bowl: one of us is an orange, another a pear, someone is a banana, or an avocado, or a lemon or lime, an apple or a grape. Yes, we are all fruit but boy are we different!
Being so different and inhabiting the same “bowl”, can make for very difficult relationships and misunderstandings. I know that so often I have felt this way in my family and I’m sure my brothers and sisters and others have felt the same way. It’s just so hard to explain what it’s like to be a strawberry to a pineapple.
Just to complicate things even more, when we add our partners to the bowl, we might introduce another really exotic or unusual fruit – never before an inhabitant of the bowl: a lychee, quince, kiwi fruit or dragon fruit.
Now stop and think for a minute…. how bland and boring would a fruit bowl be if it only had oranges in it? How long would it hold your interest? There would be no interesting shapes, colours, textures or smells. It would just be mwah.. I can’t even think of a word to describe just how dull it would be.
So let’s make an effort to welcome all fruit in the bowl:
- We are different and that is something to celebrate.
- We don’t have to compete because we are different.
- We all belong.
- We may not understand each other very well, but we can acknowledge and respect that we are bound by our humanity.
- Be who you were born to be.
- Let others be who they were born to be.
- Share the space of the fruit bowl, it’s a wonderful, sensory, exciting, colourful place.
Over to you …..
If you were a fruit, what kind of fruit would you be?
Ask a family member what kind fruit they would be?
Let’s share what we learn…