by Al Del Degan, Anthologist
When you think about a person’s life history, often that person doesn’t think their life was that interesting. What they don’t realize is that their life story is incredibly fascinating to everyone else. In fact, everyone is interesting, and the simplest things that we all take for granted are often what make us unique. Things like school, friends, jobs, family and physical locations that we lived all play a role in our diversity. When it is all thrown together, it makes for a great story that rivals any movie you have seen or book you have read, but it is real. Just that fact alone makes it valuable, not only to immediate family, but to future generations.
Next time you visit your local museum, take a moment to think about where all the details about the items in the exhibit came from. Often, they are derived from journals and writings like biographies and newspaper articles that were written by passionate people who knew how important human history is. One hundred years ago the world was focused on the war. The newspaper and radio broadcasts were often used to provide the general public with information that either the government or the media wanted share, but with their own twist on it to sway public opinion. The “true” stories were only told years later when people were interviewed, and old journals were found, often long after the writers of those journals had passed.
In our modern age with television, blogs, vlogs, YouTube, and online magazines and news, it is hard to know what to believe anymore. Our history is now being told by politicians, celebrities, as well as people looking to increase their number of followers and viewers on social media platforms. Of course, there is still those remaining big media companies that are trying to compete for eyeballs and short attention spans. Rarely do you learn the true history of society from the people who actually lived it every day.
It is more important than ever to write regularly in a journal and to ultimately capture your life story / autobiography / memoirs. If you do, one hundred years from now, future generations can learn what life was really like and what you accomplished during your footprint in the past of the history of humankind.
