Brothers

I love the Tom Hanks produced series, "Band of Brothers". The WWII saga of a unit of paratroopers from basic training to the end of the war. You get a sense of what it was like to serve, fight, die, suffer and live with all these men. To become bonded by the experience. Men need to bond with other men and we are so bad at doing it.
This past week I spent a few days with my brothers. The picture to the right of this post (or at the top of the blog if you are reading this after I have created other posts) is of me and my two brothers taken in the summer of 2005 after the funeral of our uncle. The picture as taken on the boardwalk in Atlantic City as we went back to our cousins house after the funeral. I love my brothers. We have taken different careers (they are in business - real estate), live in different areas of the country (they are in the East and I am in the West), and have different lifestyles with differing values and issues which dominate our lives. We are different people who have lived the majority of our lives apart from one another and seeing each other infrequently because of time and distance. But we are brothers. Getting together is a joy. We spend years apart and then come together and find common ground and memories to bind us together again as if we still lived in our parents house. What an amazing feat.
What is it that binds us together as families? Is it just the memories of times gone by? Is it the "blood is thicker than water" argument that says that our genealogical urges outweigh our other friendships of life? Or is it something deeper? I see myself in my brothers. I see my life in their lives. They are images of me without being me. We have been influenced differently and have lived different joys and tragedies - but their is something about them that is true in me. In their insecurities I see my own. In their actions I see my life reflected. In their strengths I see what others see when they see me. Like the mirrors at the Fun House, I am a distorted picture in their reflection because I have lived a different life. But in that mirror I can still see much of the substance of me. And that picture is worth a thousand words of revelation about who I am and what I do. It is a mirror I need to see and one I enjoy looking into. I only hope that I will do so with greater frequency in the future than I have done in the past.