Why not tell your grandchildren about you....plus their grandparents, great-grandparents, and even their great-great grandparents (that's
your grandparents)! It's really about creating a loving, lasting bond--preserving not just life stories, but relationships, for
generations to come.
Of course, you can also give them your own advice about love, work, and how to lead a good life. Here was my grandma's advice to me: "Be
what you want. If you do something, do it the best you can." Because it's my grandma, it means so much more. I'll always be able to
remember what she said because it was actually written down. What's your advice for your family? This is your opportunity to write it
down.
Reminiscing is good for you too! Over 100 studies over the last 10 years have found that reminiscing lowers depression, alleviates
physical symptoms (arthritis, asthma), and stimulates the hippocampus where memories are stored in the brain. So consider the great
health reasons for reminiscing too.
Each of us, in our search for meaning in life, has a vast amount of experience to draw upon. Our struggles and hardship, along with our achievements and blessings, teach us life's lessons. Your experience, your strength and the hope that endures are part of your unique story -- and part of the reason why you should tell your life story.
The second primary reason to tell your life story is to leave your mark. We all want to be remembered. Certainly we want to be remembered for the good we've done and for the significant accomplishments in our lives. There is satisfaction in a life well-lived. Living a life fully... richly experiencing what it means to be alive and involved in helping others is a great thing. To share with others who you are, what you are about and what you believe in is passing on some very valuable personal history.
According to the old saying, "some people are born to greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." Greatness was certainly thrust upon Rosa Parks, but the modest former seamstress has found herself equal to the challenge. Known today as "the mother of the Civil Rights Movement," Parks almost single-handedly set in motion a veritable revolution in the southern United States, a revolution that would eventually secure equal treatment under the law for all black Americans. "For those who lived through the unsettling 1950s and 1960s and joined the civil rights struggle, the soft-spoken Rosa Parks was more, much more than the woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a White man in Montgomery, Alabama," wrote Richette L. Haywood in Jet. "[Hers] was an act that forever changed White America's view of Black people, and forever changed America itself."
From a modern perspective, Parks's actions on December 1, 1955 hardly seem extraordinary: tired after a long day's work, she refused to move from her seat in order to accommodate a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery. At the time, however, her defiant gesture actually broke a law, one of many bits of Jim Crow legislation that assured second-class citizenship for blacks. Overnight Rosa Parks became a symbol for hundreds of thousands of frustrated black Americans who suffered outrageous indignities in a racist society. As Lerone Bennett, Jr. wrote in Ebony, Parks was consumed not by the prospect of making history, but rather "by the tedium of survival in the Jim Crow South." The tedium had become unbearable, and Rosa Parks acted to change it. Then, she was an outlaw. Today she is a hero.
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