Mother and daughter near the village of Skardu in remote NE Pakistan’s “Northern Areas.” Photo by Sam Carpenter.
The systems mindset will cause you to take different actions. Instead of floundering through the day in fire-killing, you will spend your moments constructing the life you desire, step-by-step. It starts with the “get it” event that will happen spontaneously and when you least expect it. When the new mindset takes hold, you will viscerally understand that life is not a chaotic mish-mash of sights, sounds and events, but a wonderfully logical place in which you observe, participate and celebrate. How does one “get” the mindset? By consciously paying attention to the systems all around. (Yes, it’s that simple.) How long does it take? It could be within a few minutes of reading this post, or more likely days or weeks, as you accumulate evidence just by consciously noticing the myriad systems around and within you. When you are ready, it will happen. Is this a metaphysical awakening? Well…yes, actually it is in the sense that you will be a layer deeper into the mechanical understanding of things.
This “getting it” post is an illustration of a powerful system that is universally familiar – the family.
Observing The Family System
If you haven’t traveled to a third world country and actually lived there for a while with the locals, consider poking around and finding a way to make it happen. My particularly memorable family experiences have been in China, Pakistan, Azad Jammu Kashmir and, quite a while ago, Puerto Rico (yes, OK: Puerto Rico isn’t technically a “third world country.”)
Stay with a local family (and for starters I recommend a decidedly different culture such as in the Far East). Sleep in their house, wake up with them in the morning and talk to them about their lives. Listen quietly to their hopes and fears and their rants and raves and all the while – if you’re like me – thank God some of them speak at least a modicum of English. (Regarding language, all of the people I have stayed with speak at least three and sometimes six languages and/or dialects while I, enormously humbled, speak just one.)
Twelve time zones removed from our home in Oregon, in remote northern Pakistan, the family is the heart of the culture, and the elements of the family equation offer fascinating contrast to our Western norms. Here, men can have up to four wives, all marriages are arranged with the vast majority cousin-to-cousin, the religious basis is exclusively Islam, and the structure is stunningly patriarchal. The average family includes five children. The back-country Pakistani family is inviolate and its mandates inarguable; its rigid structure the hub of all. One does not violate the tenets of the clan. The extended family is huge, yet because of marriage protocol and cultural expectation, tightly knit. Everyone works hard. Everyone prays. There is little dissension from the threads that hold things together.
There is little interest in geopolitics or the social concerns with which we westerners belabor ourselves.
Is all this good or bad? That’s not the point of this post, so let that part go.
Magta Khan, 7o, daughter Tahira Yasmeen, 24 and 3 of her 7 siblings, in Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu Kashmir (AJK) refugee camp, just after October 2005 earthquake that devastated AJK and parts of NWFP, Pakistan. Photo by Sam Carpenter.
Khan and his family live in the Karakoram mountains of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) of extreme northern Pakistan. It’s an agricultural life and the entire family toils from spring through fall to put aside stores for the long hard winter which, in Khan’s family’s case, includes up to 8 meters of snow on the ground. This means the family, for literally months at a time, does not venture out of the house even to visit nearby neighbors. The snow is too deep.
I ask, Khan, what do all of you do with yourselves over those long months? We talk and pray, he says. Do you get bored? No, he says. We have lots to talk and pray about. My claustrophobic western brain recoils but then I remember that simple systems work best. The back-country Pakistani family equation is simple, and to Khan’s family there is no doubt of the worth of it as the days, years and generations pass.
One can’t help but notice how much these people love their lives, and each other.
I speak to Kahn and his daughter Tahira in their tent in a refugee camp in Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu Kashmir, where they have retreated from the mountains in the wake of the horribly violent earthquake that leveled every house in their tiny village. Tahira says: Life in the tent camp is frustrating and their single goal is to get back to their land and rebuild; to resume their peaceful lives in a place that, she says, is perfect.
Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote about Khan and Tahira’s family just after the earthquake forced them to this tent camp. “…these people understand what is important in life. It is a hard-won embracing of “what is” and a fundamental, gut-level understanding that each additional breath they and their loved ones take is something for which to be enormously grateful. It’s a difficult concept to grasp for a western visitor too often caught up in soft-lifestyle frivolousness. So, for these simple people of the remote mountain villages, family, religion and consistency are necessary things; the stuff of contentment and what matters most.”
I have a personal life-longing to spend a fall and winter season with a family such as Khan’s; to drop my western peoccupation with so much that doesn’t matter, and honestly get down to the root of things.
For these people, things are held together and make sense because of systematic family bonds and expectations. Generations come and go and come and go again. It all works.
Accessible-only-by-foot Pakistani village crammed against 15,000 foot peaks on one side, and on the other, 500 foot cliffs plunging straight down to the roaring Indus River. In remote Gilgit-Baltistan autonomous region, northern Pakistan. Photo by Sam Carpenter.
The attached photos? In the image of the mother and daughter, feel the natural unadulterated connection. Sense the same bond among Khan’s family members. In the aerial photo of the village, understand the serenity of the dozen families that exist together in this tiny enclave.
Where am I going with this? To compare the western family to the Pakistani family? No. I go here: A family is a system and it’s good to take a hard mechanical look at it and how it functions in different societies. Without judgment, consider the mores; the rules. The expectations. What can be questioned and what can’t. Who does what, and why. Wherever it is, consider the system of the family and what propels it in a single direction or, in some cases (most often in the West), tears it apart.
And what is the use of going through this observation and analysis of a family in such a distant culture? It’s because the experience offers stark contrast and intimate familiarity of a profoundly important human system in action, thus increasing the possibility of an epiphany in which you realize that life is simple and good.
Your sudden movement from mechanical observation in the head, to spiritual awareness in the heart, is the point in time where life becomes – and permanently stays – magical.
