Looking back at 2023, let me ask you the same question I have asked myself: how was this year for you?

Today, I am thinking about family — about what it means, what it has meant, and what I want it to mean.

I never gave it much thought before, at least not in a way that had me wondering if all I ever believed about it was wrong.

I took the idea for granted — family is there whatever happens, family accepts you for who you are, family is concerned about your welfare, it will not abandon you or kick you out without having tried everything to bring you back to the fold.

I suppose I liken the concept to my own mother’s love and my father’s stoic presence. But after they were gone, it seemed we were left to fend for ourselves. We had lost our anchor and foundation. We drifted in our own seas of melancholy.

I always thought love would hold people together.

It’s funny because there was a time I would scoff at how showbiz people would throw around the words “I love you” like marshmallows — soft, sweet, but fluffy. Or meaningless in a way that forgets names and faces three seconds later.

The words love and family should mean more than that. Love and family — the words — should go together like two peas in a pod.

Yes, I am throwing around such a common simile because the thought of love and family is often regarded as boring stuff by so many people nowadays.

We think — because we did not choose ours, for example — that we can just ignore, neglect or reject it.

Yet it is also true that family will be the only thing you may have left when the world turns on you.

It is the same with the line, “we are family.” It can mean anything nowadays — a group with a common goal, a team that works together, an organization that has the same core values, even a dysfunctional set of humans and animals. These can be “family,” in a way. What defines them as such is that shared thing — the specific ties that bind.

What is family? What keeps it strong, what breaks it apart?

Bound by blood through marriage or modern-day partnerships, for example, families can thrive in a society that helps nurture or support them. Families are the foundation of society, after all.

When the family system is weakened — broken apart by distance and all the consequences that come with it, or torn down by loosened values — we end up with a weak society, easily crumbled by outside influences, if it hasn’t imploded of its own volition, that is.

This year has been filled with so many explosions and implosions, it seems. While the Philippines continues to grapple with the perennial issues of “poverty, lack of education, drug or substance abuse, vice, crime and unemployment,” as enumerated in the Senate website, the world has erupted with major wars, tensions have escalated hereabouts, and the ties between and among nations have been tested time and again by factors brought by changes in a post-pandemic world.

The youth face a future as uncertain as the state of our planet, even as the world continues to be bombarded by the effects of dysfunctional societies breeding nomads and mental issues.

There are three days left of 2023. Maybe it’s time we stopped overthinking the past and overplanning the future — there is a life to be lived in the present.