This little ditty I found made me think.

“I regret nothing in my life; even if the past was full of hurt…I still look back and smile. Because it made me who I am today.”

I support and encourage others to write their memoir. Other people encourage me to write mine. I should, but I haven’t. I’m thinking about it. I’m not sure how I will do that. I have to wonder, though. Would that experience get me to “look back and smile?” Would I discover what is was that “made me who I am today?”

Another meme I saw was,

“When a man dies, that particular vision of life that is his, and his alone, dies with him. Therefore, it behooves every man to tell his story, his unique vision.”

The value of such writing is ironically unselfish. Any story about me is not for me, except that in the discovery process only I would experience the memory for it what it is, and the story for what it was. It is, as perhaps all art and writing should be, for the reader and the looker. Would anyone ever ask, “What was it about him? What was he like? What did he do?”

Being born shortly after the end of the Second World War has placed me at the front of the Baby Boomer generation. For years I have lead my generation into a crowd. There were, and still are, many of us. We were there in the 1960s, enjoying the music and revolutionary attitude of the time. In the 70s we had our young adult experiences. Our children were born in the 70s and 80s and are called Generation X. In the 80s and 90s, we did our thing made the world what it was for us. Those were our career and adult growth years.

As we crossed the Y2K panic, some of us started to mellow and to wind things down. The millennial century found us touching career capstones and looking ahead to watching grandchildren grow and experiencing our own retirement. Now, tossing about age numbers from the fifties up to being septuagenarians, we remember that we have ‘been there and done that.’

Anyone of any age, but especially those of us over the age of fifty, should be thinking about writing memoir. There is bountiful assistance available through books, on line resources, ghost writers, or from friends and family. We should be writing and telling them our stories so that our unique vision lives on, long after we do.