Your letter helps more than your grandchildren and yourself. It also helps you children. As they read your life stories, they will know some of them, but probably not of your early stories. Those stories will be new to them. They will learn things about you that they never knew. They will get to see different sides of your life. 

Writing is deeper than talking. Written words are generally deeper than spoken words. As you children read a story you have written they will see a deeper meaning in your experience.

It should also provide them an example of how to write a letter to their own grandchildren. It will want to make them continue the unbroken chain of letters so each generation will be able to look back at their families past with no missing pieces. They can see patterns and relationships.

They can see how bad times make strong people. How strong people make good times. How good times lead to weak people. How weak people lead to hard times. 

So many times life is repeats itself and when you can see those cycles you will be much better off.

“The Story of My Life”

by Helen Keller

Awesome book that will surely motivate you to write your own letter. Here is a woman that is both blind and deaf. Pause and just think about that. She can’t see anything and she can’t hear anything. Spend 30 seconds with your eyes closed and pretend you can’t see or hear anything. Total darkness and silence for the rest of your life. Thanks to Anne Sullivan who had to work so hard and so long to break into that darkness, Helen finally broke out of that kind of hell by understanding that the way Anne Sullivan’s fingers were moving meant “water.” Helen broke through her endless silent night of suffering and learned to communicate with finger gestures. As touch was her only way of communication, she poured her life into reading sign language and reading Braille. Helen eventually learned four different languages; English, French, German and Latin. She graduated from Radcliffe University – the woman’s equivalent of Harvard. She played chess and road bicycles. Yes, it was on the back of tandem bike. She read hundreds of books and she wrote her own biography. If a blind and deaf person can write their autobiography, can you? 

All through life I have struggled with patience. When God was handing out patience in heaven I got out of line. I didn’t want to wait.

Now the first step in the 12 steps of recovery is acknowledgment. Yes, I realize I have a problem. 

But for the first half of my life, I was in denial. I thought the rest of the world had a problem with time and I was the one that had it right. I feel that the most valuable thing on the plant earth is time. You can’t buy back a second for a trillion dollars. Not one second. When you spend time with someone, you are giving them the most valuable thing you can possibly give them – your time. 

So when you respect your time and other people’s time you are being respectful of the greatest gift God has given you. When you don’t respect your time or other people’s time, you are wasting your most precious gift.

I still believe these things. What I have changed my view on is the fact that other people don’t see or appreciate the truth of these things. In the first half of my life I expected people to see the obvious truth of the value of time. In the second half, I am beginning to accept that people don’t appreciate time in the same way I do. The way to fix the issue is not to get frustrated with other people, but to understand that I see it differently and the foolishness of trying to teach other people the value of time. 

The second and more important way to deal with this issue is to change myself. I cannot change others, but I can change how I deal with moments when I have to wait for others. That is within my power and that I can control by making the best use of my waiting time. I have developed many different techniques to make use of waiting time. One good one is to read. You can have books on your phone. Another is to pray. Another is to check social media or play a game on my phone. 

I am getting more patient, I really am. I feel very proud of myself that I have grown to be more patient in less than 70 years. Some people never get there. My family reputation for impatience is now the thing of legends. I may never be able to overcome my reputation in spite of hundred of thousands of hours I have spent and continue to spend waiting for other people. Oh well, they can waste their time on debating my current state of recovery, as for me, I don’t have the time to even consider it.

The second most important decision you can make in your life is who you will marry. That decision will affect your daily happiness for the rest of your life. 

But after you make that very important decision, the real work begins. Marriage is hard work. It is very hard work, but it is also very, very rewarding. You have to work at marriage to make it successful. You want your children and your grandchildren to have happy marriages that last and bring more joy than difficulty. 

Pass on the things that worked for you such as;

Use as many nicknames as possible

Never go to bed angry

Go to bed at the same time

Money is very important. Talk about it.

Learn their love language

Make your marriage your highest priority

Marriage is a union of two successful forgivers

Prioritize sex

Go on dates

Be your spouses biggest fan

Pray together

Have talks 

Be quick to forgive

Let the little things go

Honesty

Trust

When something is bothering you, talk about it

Family meals

Make time for the two of you

Flirt with each other

Laugh with each other

Go for walks on the beach and hold hands

Watch sunsets together

Also pass on the things that don’t work.

Stonewalling

Not forgiving

Infidelity

Trouble with finances

Not being prepared for marriage

Just off the top of your head, what are the top five most important moments in your life?

What made them important? 

They all probably have very strong emotional elements. Moments that left a lasting and deep impression on your heart. These are the moments that you should write about. They reveal what you really think is important and what touches your heart. If you are brutally honest with yourself, some of these moments will be difficult and painful.

You don’t have to write about any that you don’t want to write about. If some are too difficult, then leave them out. Focus on the positive. However, it is both the happy inspiring stories that help the next generation as well as the painful stories that provide great learnings.

Possible Memorable Moments

Christmas mornings

Birthday Parties

First crushes

First car

Spiritual moments in church

Coming of age

Living alone

Vacations

Seeing the wonders of the world

Wedding day

Birth of your children

Promotions at work

New jobs

Family drama

Birth of grandchildren

Illness

Spiritual awakening

If your are really lucky in life, you find things you like to do and you can do them. 

These are your passions. The things you talk about over and over again. The things you just have to do. The things that you think spending a lot of money on is well justified.

These are things that define us unique. The added bonus about including your passions in your letter is that you already love sharing them with other people. You will find it easy to write about them as you find it easy to talk about them. 

You definitely want to include the passions in your life. Tell it like it is; why you love it so much, how you got into it, what is your biggest accomplishment, what did you alway want to do – but never did. How did your passion differ from other people who were passionate about the same thing. 

It could be anything from cycling to building models or from cooking to scrap booking. Revealing your passions opens a window to your soul that is shining a beautiful bright light out from your unique soul to the rest of the world. Let it shine.

“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? 

“There is no such thing as great writing, only great rewriting.”

Robert Graves

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway rewrote the final chapter of “Farewell to Arms” 39 times before he found it acceptable. 39 times! If it is that hard for a Nobel prize winning author, it is going to hard for the rest of us. That is good news because it means that when you find it hard to write, you are in great company.

The truth is writing is hard. Hard for everyone. So when you are struggling to get the words down or get them right take great consolation that you are in great company. The most important thing is to just keep doing the work. Put the words down. Understand that they will not be perfect when you write them for the first time. This is perfectly normal. This is part of the process. 

You need to find the method that works for you. Maybe you write a page in a stream of consciousness and then new page gets better and the third page is even better. May be you write a page one day and rewrite it the next day. Maybe you write three pages and then go back and do some editing. It will take trial and error to get your method right. But understand that writing is not an easy process and even the greatest writers of all time have to edit and rewrite their own work.