The Giving Tree: Why we always return to family

In 2017, I met a tattoo artist who would change not only my appearance, but also my perspective. His name is Keoki, he hails from Hawaii, and he operates a parlor in Atlanta called Perpetual Roots. The first time I sat down with Keoki, I could feel it. Oh my gosh. His energy matches mine. Instead of following a specific design, Keoki said he would free hand my vision.

Five years later, I have 35 hours of tattoo time with Keoki. It’s time for a tattoo, I’ll decide when something significant happens in my life, and every single time, something remarkable happens. Keoki free-hands it while we talk, having this amazing energy exchange, and the end result will always have family at the center.

Keoki says, “You know, Chris, family is always in the middle, right?”

Family is always in the middle, and no matter how much we might bicker and fight, our tribe is what gives us our vibe. Spending so much time together means that we naturally share the vibrational frequencies that make us more attuned to ourselves, to the world, to our purpose, and to each other.

In my last post, I wrote about my twin brother, Ben, and the way he’s been literally swimming his way through recovery—a journey documented by filmmaker Matt Corliss in the upcoming Swim Tuff. When I hit my rock bottom, Ben said, “Chris, you gotta stay in your own hula hoop.” My hula hoop was my family of my wife, Julie, and our daughters, Finley and Marlin. And the hula hoop was my first tattoo. I reoriented myself around my hula, my two daughters and my wife.

Were there times this summer when I completely lost it on the girls, because they were fighting nonstop? Hell, yes. Absolutely. It’s never perfect, but family is at the core of everything I do.

The roots go deeper, of course, to my parents and my siblings, and the family tree that spreads so many generations and geographic locations from Australia and Atlanta to Colorado and the United Kingdom. We come back to family, we come back to those connections of vibrational frequencies, and we come back (if we work at it) to being our true, authentic selves. This gives us the ability to create genuine relationships with others, because we are able to share our stories. Sure, we all have pain and heartbreak in our past, but the power of storytelling and the power of vulnerability in the present moment recasts the past in a different light.

I'll scare people with my openness and vulnerability, but I believe the line between work and life is a vanishing line. Personal lives and family lives are part of the passion we bring to jobs we love. So to those of us who were brought up to “rise above it” instead of work through it, and to compartmentalize instead of getting a bit messy sometimes, I encourage more transparency. This can begin with the simple hula hoop around you and your immediate family, no matter how small that hoop may be. You don’t need to get a tattoo, but for yourselves, your family, and your career, what are you going to do?