Connect with Your Lineage

Argonaut’s Circles Program is built on a set of 50 Essential Experiences, each designed to develop the skills in adolescence that lead to a happy, connected, purposeful life. These experiences are sorted into five categories: Independence, Connection, Healthy Body & Mind, Waking Up, and Making the World Better.

Essential Experience #33 is Connect with your lineage. This experience begins with the metaphor of a tree. When you see a tree, you may notice its trunk, its arching branches, its rich green leaves. But are you actually seeing the whole tree? If that were all of it, why wouldn’t it fall over easily? If you think about it a bit more, you will realize that there is a huge root system beneath the tree, anchoring it to the ground through storms, providing water and nutrients, even helping to connect the tree to the ecosystem of other plants and microorganisms around it. You could never understand a tree if you looked at it only from the ground up. We humans are like trees, visible from the ground up, but with invisible roots underneath us which affect our behavior and our view of the world. These roots are our ancestors, our family stories, and the journeys our family has taken. We can’t really understand ourselves (or anyone else) without understanding these ancestral roots and family stories. 

Students might choose this experience if they want to understand their family’s history and story better, or if they’re feeling lost and looking for a feeling of rootedness, a sense of where they’ve come from. However they begin, an experience may reveal the stories and wisdom that have been sitting untouched around us in our families, and may help a young person discover where they stand in a long arc of people who have brought them to this point. From there, the world looks different, a bit less uncertain. The view is into the long term, where today’s concerns fade and are replaced by deeper questions of what we value and stand for.