Remember the days when there wasn’t enough time to check in with friends; not enough time to call parents; not enough time to deviate from your incredibly busy schedule?
Today, amid the coronavirus crisis and the necessary social distancing policy, the world has given us a chance to rethink our priorities. In a time of uncertainty, the only thing we know for sure is that staying close to family, in person or virtually, matters a lot!
But how much do you know about your family members? About their lives before they came to be your parents or grandparents or about your other relatives that you don’t get to see often? Do you know who they were? And most importantly, would your kids and generations to come, know?
Before modern societies were established, the only way to know history was through the stories that were told. Inaccurate or imperfect, it was still a way to preserve the memories of the ones that came before us. We rely on technology so much today that we trust that somehow, somewhere, everything that we randomly upload to the internet will be gathered and interpreted by someone in the future interested in knowing about our history, because we just don’t have the time to tell a story today.
This is a pretty good time to journal for your own sanity and for the purpose of preserving the stories of this unprecedented time in history. And it’s also a good time to rescue the memories of your family’s history.
How to tell the stories
There are many easy — and private — ways of doing it using LifeTales.
For example, you might create a journal, adding fresh content as you go. To make it easy, think about taking just 5 minutes a week to record yourself recounting what your week was like, what went through your mind, what happened in the news, and any other relevant (or not) thoughts. This is a very simple way of capturing a moment in time with little effort. Here’s a quick LifeTales story on how to create your first story.
To rescue your family’s stories, you can start a memoir and pick a family member you can interview. Once you start that memoir on LifeTales, it comes with a set of basic guidelines on how to get started. That’s a simple approach where you can have the whole family engaged and also learn things about your family you probably didn’t even know. Maybe another family member will choose to do the same and interview someone else from the family. Then you’d really get to know where you come from!
You can also tell the stories you never told your friends or family about a trip you took, an experience you had or something new you learned. See how influencer Brook Monks interviews her son about a family vacation they had, adding comments to photos and/or videos that can help give context to the moments.
The options are endless. What matters is that we now have been gifted with some time to make the most of it.
In the Pixar movie Coco, aside from being a beautifully animated film about the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, it leaves us with an important lesson: you only really die when no one remembers you. So let’s keep our memories alive. Let’s tell those stories today.
