Because it's about the stories

If it is true that learning is an adventure, then life must be a travelogue.


          Life is about the places you’ve been, the people you’ve met, the impact all that has made on you and the impact you’ve made upon others. In short, life is about the stories we collect. History, then, must be the collection of all those stories.

Sometimes it is the collection of stories from differing viewpoints about the same thing. The first time Captain Edward J. Smith ever saw the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic, his feelings must have been very different from those of Robert Ballard and his co-workers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution the first time they saw the ship. The gap between those different experiences is filled by history.

A little boy might be awed by his first visit to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to see a professional football game. He might never forget the sights and sounds of that first time. Years later, as a grown man, he might return to the world-famous venue as a journalist charged with covering a ball game for a newspaper and by then his perception would be changed. No longer awed by sights and sounds, his only interest would be the facts. What happened? Again, the gap in time is filled by history. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum has thousands of stories to tell but when that boy-turned-reporter finally retired, his strongest memory of the place might have been the smell of the hot dogs.

Ulysses Grant did not make an overwhelming impression on Robert E. Lee when they first met. Both were serving in the United States Army at the time, fighting for the same country. That sure changed by the time they met at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865. By then, Grant had made an impression on the older Lee. 

Here’s an exercise: Pick two points in your own life and then fill in the gaps between them. Remember your first day of high school and your last? Still have friends left over from those days? What kind of stories do you have to tell on each other? That’s what we call history. Did you discover your life’s calling in high school? Meet a future spouse? Wreck your first car? You get extra points if you did all three and the tales you spin about each event are what life is all about.

Most of us do not live to become so well known as Lee or Grant, nor so lamented as Smith. Still, all of us have stories to tell and that is what this is leading up to.

Write them down. Get those stories recorded, one way or another. Write them or dictate them to a recorder. Do something to get those experiences preserved. It has never been easier to make a historic ledger of your life and it is a shame that so few people are taking advantage of the opportunity. Somewhere down the historic line, someone is going to ask what you were like and it would be a wonderful thing if the answer was, “I don’t remember him very well, but he wrote these stories.”

It’s your chance to make friends with someone you’ll never meet. And that would make a great story.

Thanks for reading.