Family as the Ship of Theseus

For some irksome reason, the old philosophical question about the Ship of Theseus has come to new life as a business cliché. Type “Ship of Theseus and business” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll find numberless (yawn… whoops, sorry… started to drift off there) articles about organizations as Ships of Theseus.

If you’re so lucky that you haven’t run into this cliché, it asks whether at the end of hundreds of years of maintenance and restoration—in which every part of a ship has eventually been replaced—a ship is still the same ship? Answer: who cares outside of Philosophy Departments? It’s a dull thought experiment about the persistence of identity across time.

I’m of a sufficient age that Thanksgiving now has as many absences as presences. The Berens Family has had a rough handful of years marked by the deaths of my cousin Meredith’s father Larry, the death of Sandy (the mother of my cousins Steffi, David, Michael, Lilly, and Scott), the death of my brother Evan, and just two weeks ago the death of Russ, my father’s brother and father to the cousins who lost Sandy less than two years ago.

Although there was a somber cast to the gathering at David and Meredith’s this year, seeing family meant even more than usual. We avoided political conversation because as many of us were satisfied with the results of the recent election as were disappointed. Instead, we focused on what brought us together.

It was also a joy to see the next generation at the so-called kids’ table. Most of them are young adults now, ranging from 19 to 24, having spirited and obscure conversations of their own. We also had Scott’s much younger children (aged five and two), hanging closer to their grownups.

There’s no question that this is still the Berens Family, even though the cast of characters keeps changing. Family identity across time requires just two things: co-presence and attention. It’s a muscle that you have to exercise, not a thing like a ship that you repair.

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