It's History, Write It Down

Earlier, in my regular radio career, I was something of a known quantity in the community. Because of that, I was sometimes asked to speak at Elks Club or Rotary luncheons. But I never had the horsepower to be invited to address a high school or college graduating class, and with no children of my own, I wouldn’t have felt qualified anyway. But this COVID year is an exception, so here are my inspiring words for you young whippersnappers.

You may be tired of hearing, “We’re all in the same boat.” As has been said, we’re all in the same storm, but many different boats.

Suppose you’ve been crammed into one small boat with your own family for two months and simply want COVID to be over, which it won’t be for a while. There are things you can do with this time. It may be your first rodeo, to mix metaphors a little, but it is not this country’s, nor the world’s. You can dig into history and see how folks handled the last comparable pandemic – the Spanish Flu of 1918, and especially the years that followed it. It did end, and people returned to a version of what we would think of as normal.

Even in your own family, you may have ancestors who lived through that  pandemic or other major events. Now, it’s you who are living through history and have a story to tell to future generations. If you don’t already have a journal, think about starting one.

\Write about not just what’s physically happening in your life, but how you feel about it. You may think you have nothing memorable to say, or don’t think of yourself as a journal-ist, so to speak,  but your words will increase in value with time, and may be precious later to your descendants and others studying history. Even now, though, it will have value for you, as the mere act of putting it all down will help you process what’s going on, and you will think of our current trial as an experience rather than just a pain. Write for yourself first, which is the best way to tell your story.

Be aware that as you get older, you will condense, and even revise, history in your head. With a journal, you can go back and see what you really did and felt at the time, which could be something of a surprise, as you may discover it didn’t happen as you remember it at all.

If you do start a journal, I’d suggest hand-writing it or printing it out periodically, as you don’t know what electronic media or software (or whatever) there may be in the future that no longer supports, as they say, what you’ve done.

So go forth, sons and daughters, and those in between -- and oh yeah, put your mask on first.