“The best teacher is pain.”
When you write your letter to your grandchildren the hardest thing to write about may be the most helpful thing to write about – your hardest moments in life. They are the stories that will provide the biggest help to your grandchildren. Everyone’s fine when everything is fine. It’s crises that make or break us. Life is not what happens to you, it is how you react to it. When something goes very, very wrong there is a great golden learning moment to be had for the person that moves on.
How did you get through it? What did you tell yourself? Where did you find comfort and wisdom? What were the paths you could have chosen and why did you choose the one you chose? What did you learn? Did this difficulty teach you how to cope or avoid a similar challenge? Did you become bitter or better?
It may be especially hard to write about a difficult time that was the result of your making or mistake. But mistakes are part of life – always have been and always will be. For as long as humans are humans we will be making mistakes. Throw away shame and pride and write the facts. Tell the brutal truths if you can. If you can’t bear to write about them, then don’t. The point is not hurt yourself, the point is to help other people.
You have two things going for you when you write about your lessons learned from your own mistakes. First is that time heals. It even heals yours own mistakes. You can laugh a mistake the next day or it may take ten years before you can laugh at it, but the day will come. The second is you get to be the writer. You can conduct your own experiments with truth. You can be truthful and leave some things out. You can put a favorable spin on what happened. Just know that the more truthful your story is, the better the lesson is for the student.
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