Spending Quality Family Time – How Important Is It?

Spending quality time with family is often given less concentration by most of us.
“If you can not spend at least one hour for yourself, for your family,
if you can not invest one hour to be with your family, chatting, sharing and caring and playing,
If you can not manage to allocate 4 % of your day (one hour of a day) to be with your family,
then what on earth is your purpose of life?
what is the meaning of such a living? “

If these sentences are giving shocks to you, it is high time for introspection.

Table of Contents

Types of lives

A day can be divided into many lives.

1. Personal life: sleeping, enjoying music alone, reading newspaper, hobbies, watching TV alone, gym etc.

2. Professional life: work life.

3. Family life: Spending quality time with family, family vacation, enjoying a movie or TV show together, playing games, helping kids in home work etc

4. Social life: spending time with friends, or doing some work for a good cause

5. Spiritual life: prayer, Yoga, visiting a place of worship etc.

Among all these things, I would say that the family life is the most important.
Professional life – though you may not concentrate hard, you would spend at lest 8 hours a day with work, by effort or by default.
Personal life – you would invest in it even if someone advises not to.
Social life – a mixture of voluntary and involuntary activity, which is purely subjective in nature.
Spiritual life – Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa says – If you can not love your family and people around you, who are visible to you, then how can you love God who is not visible to the naked eyes?

Ways to spend quality time with family

If focused properly, except for professional life, we can easily merge all our lives with family life.

Merging personal life with family life

Include your family members in the hobby of yours. It will create bonding and fills lot of fun into the hobby.
If you are reading a news paper, share the important news with your family, you will get different angled opinions.
If you go to a gym or outdoor games, play the same outdoor game with your family. You will discover the hidden fun in the game.

Merging social life with family life

If you are going for a social work, let your wife or husband be involved in it.
What is the fun in the party without your life partner?
What is the fun in watching a movie, without your spouse / kids beside you?

Merging spiritual life with family life

You can visit the place of worship with your family. It will strengthen the bonding.
It will give time and space for everyone to retrospect and to correct mistakes.
You can do prayers together with family.
One person coming and pleading to you for something as compared to five persons coming and pleading for something – it does make some difference, doesn’t it? Same law apply to prayers.

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