“Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted,” once spoken by Paul Pearshall. When I needed to pick a word to juxtapose with sustainability, family automatically popped into my head. Sustaining a family is one of the hardest things to do. As the world keeps aging and the generations keep dramatically changing, it seems impossible to sustain a family.

In order to relate family with sustainability, we first must examine what the meaning of family is. Family, in a dictionary, can be utilized in many different ways when this word is desired to be used. A family can mean parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not; the children of one person or one couple collectively; the spouse and children of one person; any group of persons closely related by blood, as parents, children, uncles, aunts, and cousins; all those persons considered as descendants of a common progenitor. No matter what words you use and which dictionary you choose to peruse, no brief definition can define what a family is. Yes, a family is the blood connection that ties you to your ancestry, but family is so much more than that.

Family means a permanent, eternal attachment to where and who you came from. Anyone can irreversibly change who they are, how they look, and everything else in their lives. However, no one can change where they came from, and more importantly, who they came from. Family can be distanced, ignored, dissolved, and mutated in every which way, but it can never be changed, family is a mark on your life that is unchangeable.

I come from a colossal family; my dad has eight brothers and sisters, on the other end of the spectrum, my mom has two sisters. My mom's sisters never had any children, so all of my family comes from my dad's side. Between my dad and my eight aunts and uncles, the combined children they had, my cousins, totaled twenty-five, well that we know about, but that’s a whole other paper! My family has a lot of drama and untold secrets, there are always different parts of the family fighting and so we never really all get together. However, whenever I am in any type of trouble, no matter when, where, what, why, or how, I know I will see every single one of them if I need my family in any situation; just as I would be standing beside anyone in my family when they need me. A family is supposed to be standing beside you when no one else chooses to. When this earth is stripped of all the superficiality that is confined here, all you have left are the people that make the choice to stand by you when no one else will. Everyone starts this world with a family, and everyone will leave this world with a family, it's the only guarantee that you can always count on. No matter where life takes you and what you do in life, the one quote I suggest people live by is "blood is thicker than water." When times get rough and people must choose to take the hard path or the easy path, you will always know that your family will be to your left and right when you choose to walk down the difficult road.

Automatically, I thought sustaining a family meant keeping them together and in touch and making sure that they're in communication. However after reading into it some more, my complete idea of family sustainability was changed.

At first, my whole idea of family mixing with the word sustain was that the family name was carried on. That a family made sure that there was a next generation and a generation after the next and that was sustaining it. A sustained family was the family that lasted through generation to generation. Meaning a sustainable family was the one that allowed each generation to have the distinct joy to know a member of the family who made their mark on the generation before. Keeping the name alive, making it immortalized just by maintaining the last name as the descendants grow. In my opinion, sustaining a family means much more than just carrying the name from era to era.

Family sustainability means to actually keep a family alive. The Sustain Program is one in which you can help an immediate family actually sustain and live. The Sustain Program lets families be able to live in a sustainable community and in return, eventually sustain their family by keeping it alive. By giving a monthly gift and/or donation, your contribution goes to sustaining a community so that each family in the community can have access to clean water and other resources so that they can remain living and sustain their families by surviving just one more day. World Vision, a non-profit global relief organization, reported on a three year old toddler and her mother, dying from AIDS in Southern Africa. World Reported on how the only thing sustaining this family was their faith in God. This family survived each and every day on the sole hope and belief that God can and would get them through their current situation. I can also relate because my family has inspired me to turn to God whenever I need help and family cannot fix it. I believe that having faith that God can do anything brings my family closer together and really bonds us. Sustaining our faith and trust in God leads us to sustain our families.

Sustaining a family can also be seen as making sure family is there tomorrow and the next day, keeping it alive physically, emotionally, and mentally. Enduring whatever comes and preserving hopes and maintaining love. Sustaining a family means making sure each person that belongs to a specific family knows of their importance to the family and how precious they are to the family to allow each member to want to keep their family alive and in love. So that whenever family is mentioned, every member of a family can reflect on their family and smile because that’s what supposed to happen; keeping your family alive in any which way to establish what a family is so that the next generation can sustain the family and then in turn teach how to sustain a family to the generation after. Sustaining a family is something that should be passed down because it’s such an important quality that everyone needs to know when they conclude that they want to continue the family.

Family sustainability can also mean keeping a family together especially when tragedy strikes. When a family becomes burdened with a major dilemma, sustaining can mean keeping everyone out of the chaos and making sure the family stays together. Doing everything in your power, everything possibly known to do, in order to make sure your family gets through, but not only that they get through, but they get through together. Coming from a big family, we are hardly ever in contact with each other as much as we'd like to be, but whenever a tragedy hits the family, we all make sure we come out the other side together and we're usually a stronger connected family because of it, and that in fact could be what sustaining a family is all about.

Family sustainability is making sure a connection, a bond, is always kept alive between the people that will unquestionably always have your back. Families can be dysfunctional and crazy, but at the end of the day, they are your family. Sustaining a family means to make sure what the family was yesterday, is the family that’s there tomorrow. But if the family is not how a family should be kept alive, every person in this world has the ability to change it, to make sure that the people you enter this world with, are the people you leave this world with. Desmond Tutu is quoted as saying, “You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.” Most people in today’s society don’t value how special it is to have a family, to know unconditional love and support, which should and will always be sustained.

In my opinion, family means everything in the world to me. I could never imagine being part of another family, nor would I ever choose to be part of a different one. Most people could never understand everything my family has gone through, we’ve been through a lot and luckily we are still here together. My grandmother, who every grandchild called Nan or Nanny, taught me everything I could ever want to know about sustaining a family. I never actually realized how many lessons she instilled in me until I wrote this paper, six years after her passing. I guess she always knew she had to stick some life lessons in my subconscious, and I thank her every day for the gifts she gave me. Nanny, no matter who was fighting or what was being argued, always made sure that the entire family stuck together and supported each other in times of heartbreaks and misfortunes. Nanny made sure to keep her children together so that they, in turn, could keep me and my cousins together so that we, in turn, can keep our children together. Continuously, she showed us all how to lead a family by herself, after the tragic death of my grandfather in the 60’s. Nanny went through a multitude of grief-stricken situations and I honestly to this day have no clue how she did what she did. After all she went through, the only reasoning I have for how much she went through to keep my family together is the amount of unconditional love she had for each and every one of us, living and yet to be born. Nanny was the matriarch of my amazing family, and I will credit her with that every day for the rest of my life, and will teach my kids about her and her love so that she can be sustained throughout my personal family for the rest of time. Sustaining my family has a certain place in my heart because I want to keep my family alive and strong for generations to come.

In the end, sustaining a family is and will undoubtedly be one of the hardest challenges mankind has been faced with, will be faced with, and continues being faced with at the moment. Not one person in this world chooses who gives them the joy of life, but every single person in this world has the choice of what way their family should be sustained. Family is the best quality of life, and the most important item in life, which is why all inhabitants of this earth need to let go of their pride, suck it up and face the challenge to sustain their most precious gift God gives, family. After all, what would family mean to each and everyone one of us if it was not sustained? But if it was not sustained, would we even be here at all to question what family means?