“For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

William Shakespeare

“For there is nothing fun or boring, but your attitude makes it so.”

Guiseppi Soranski

You can always look at any situation from different ways. What determines whether an activity is easy or hard is the way you look at it. It is your attitude that makes an activity happy or sad. And since you have complete control of your thoughts, why would you choose sad over happy when doing any task?

Make writing your letter fun. Here are five ways to help you make it fun.

Reward Yourself

Give yourself rewards for completing pages. After you finish one page, have some chocolate. After you finish two pages, have some ice cream. After you finish 100 pages, go on a vacation. The key is to find what really works for you. 

Be Messy

Any attempt at perfection during the first attempt at anything will only result in disappointment. Realize that when you write, it will not be anything near perfect the first time you write it. Just get some thoughts down. That is victory. That is something to be happy about.

Be Authentic

Write about what you care about.

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Find Your Inspirations

There are a billions ways to be inspired and to help get your creative juices flowing. I think the easiest and best way is the internet. You don’t even have to stand up from your laptop and you can visit a billion web sites and find a million sites that pique your interest and get your motor running. 

Just A Little

Just do a little bit of writing. Give yourself a specific limit to your writing so the daunting task is doable. Tell yourself you will only write 100 words or write for 20 minutes. You can handle 20 minutes and when you are done you will be victorious. Winning is fun.

When you write the story of your life you are able to see your life in a much different way than if you never wrote about it. 

Writing requires organizing your thoughts. When you write about your life you are organizing your thoughts. You organize your life into stories, important events, lessons learned or one of a hundred different ways. Writing allows you to see patterns and to connected the dots with a thoughtful review of your past organized into sentences that express complete thoughts and paragraphs that are organized with specific ideas. 

It is like riding a bike across the country. You can experience or look at it in many different ways. Two basic ways would be a micro view and a macro view. A micro view would be to see the whole ride from the seat, pedals and handlebars. You see it as pedaling, as wind in your face, as different smells, difficult climbs over steep hills, as hard rides into the wind and more. A macro view is to use your mind to lift yourself off the bike and fly high above yourself. Then you see it as day 31, on Highway 39, crossing the border from one state to another, the next town is “A” then “B” then “C”, I have $395.00 in cash for emergencies, I feel great about myself for doing this, I have to stay determined to reach my final goal and more.

When you experience life without writing about it, you only experience it from the seat, pedals and handlebars. But writing lifts you up off the bike and provides a much bigger perspective to your life. Writing allows examination from higher places. These examinations improve the quality of your life by providing a bigger view. A view you could never see without the organization of your thoughts through writing.

Life is changing and changing fast. One thing you should include in you story are the things you did that your grandchildren will never do because life has changed so much. My grandfather used to hook up two dozen horses to pull a wheat combine. My mother used to feed chickens and then take off feathers before cooking them. I used to dial a rotary phone and had to go to the library to find out how many people lived in Peru. 

These are the things that your grandchildren are going to want to know – the way things used to be. Things they will never have to do and will find it amazing that you had to do them. I will provide them with a useful understanding that life does change and that it is changing quickly.

It might be helpful to them to let them know how hard life used to be. Truth is that life is physically much easier today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. Another truth is that it was much simpler and had it’s own benefits. Not having a cell phone was a simpler life without comparing your life to your friends. It was a safer world where kids drank water out of garden hoses and could ride their bikes as far as they wanted as long as they were home by the time the street lights came on. There was much more trust in neighbors and people were not as polarized as they are today. 

What things do you remembering doing that your grandchildren will be amazed that you actually did?