You Are an Elder

Generally speaking, there is a universal respect in all cultures and throughout history for elders. Elders have seen more and done more. They are wise. Not always, but almost all the time. There is a crown in gray hairs that commands respect. Use it.

Stories

Your age has provided you with lots and lots of stories to tell. Grandchild love stories! They love hearing how one uncle used to keep a toothbrush in his glove box to brush his teeth on the long commute to work only to have his son tell his dad he has been using it to clean his soccer cleats for months.

Second Most Powerful Relationship

A child’s most powerful relationship is with their parents. Their second most powerful relationship is with their grandparents. That is a lot of power. Make the best use of that power when you are with them. They will read your letter because you are that important to them.

You Write Your Family History

Only you can write your family history. You were the one that lived it. You hold the pen that writes the family history. It is in your power to include and exclude. It is in your power to see the positive or negative. History is written by the victors. Writing your letter makes you a victor.

When you think of writing your memoir, you think of looking back at your life. Memoir is looking backwards. In the process of looking backward something very strange happens – you write stories that give you a sense of resolution for your future. Writing your memoir allows you to make your past clear and understandable. You clear up your past and deal with it successfully. It is a great paradox that looking back helps you look forward.

Almost all therapy is doing just that – processing or thinking about the past until it makes sense so you can have a better future. So, in a very real sense, writing a memoir is very much like a therapy session. Making sense of your past thoughts and behavior begets a better tomorrow.

When you write a letter to your grandchildren, you do more than make a list of your actions. You write a story about them. Your story follows a pattern. It could be the hero’s journey or a love story. You make sense of your past life by writing it as a story. Without writing your story, you are left with moments of joy or sorrow.

Write your own story. Make sense of your past. It will help you make better decisions today so your future can be better. It will also help your grandchildren make better decisions in their life.

If you don’t write a letter to your grandchildren does that mean you love them less? No.

It does mean you missed an opportunity.

There are many ways you can express love to your grandchildren.

Gary Chapman’s book “The Five Love Languages” is an excellent book with a very helpful idea on how best to express love. The basic concept is that everyone has a different love language. Chapman cites five major categories: Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, Words of Affirmation and Physical Touch. Find the one that resonates with your partner and provide it. If your grandchild’s love language is Acts of Service and you provide only the remaining four, you will struggle to satisfy their need to be loved effectively. Find your grandchildren’s love language and use it.

However, you have limited time with your grandchildren and even more limited time with your great grandchildren. Eventually, the only way to express love is through written words after you are gone. Maybe it’s only one the five, maybe it’s not the most effective love language for your great, great granddaughter, but it is something.

There is an amazing process that has changed world-wide manufacturing that can be applied to writing your letter to your grandchildren. It is called Kaizen.

In manufacturing it the process of continuous improvement through small incremental changes. It was first fully utilized by Toyota and now they are the largest car manufacturing company in the world. It works.

One Kaizen concept that can be used successfully to write your letter is the idea of small changes. In his book “One Small Step Can Change Your Life” Robert Maurer writes about how when a person is faced with a very large task (like writing a life story) the brain immediately reacts with fear. This fear comes from thousands of years of evolution and comes from a person’s ‘lizard brain.’ It is the limbic part of the human brain. It reacts in less than one second to anything that triggers fight or flight. It is much, much more powerful than people think.

If you say to yourself, “I’m need to write a 500 page memoir”, the lizard brain kicks in with a vengeance. Part of that powerful reaction results in shutting down the full use of the prefrontal cortex. That is the part of your brain that plays a central role in your cognitive control functions. The part of you that successfully solves problems.

What triggers the lizard brain is fear. Writing 500 pages is too much. However, if you tell yourself you have write one paragraph, your lizard brain doesn’t panic. It doesn’t consume you with fear. It is not a threat. You react from your prefrontal cortex and not from you lizard brain.

The pattern changes from large challenge to fear and eventual failure to small challenge to calm thinking to eventual success. 

Use this Kaizen concept of picking small achievable goals that lead to eventual success through continuous small steps toward overall improvement and success.

You can write one paragraph leads ultimately to a successful letter to your grandchildren.

You hold in your possession the pen that writes your life story. 

When you let other people get you angry or upset, you give away your pen. You let them write the story of your life. You give up your own power of story telling and give them the power to write your story. 

Hold on to your pen.

Never let other people write your life story or tell you what you are worth. Write your own story. If they try to tell you that you are unworthy or that they are superior – hold on to the pen and write your own story of self-worth. Write your own hero’s journey. 

Never give up the pen to write your own story.

“If you’re not writing your own story, you are a character is someone else’s.”

Chris Brogan

 “When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold the pen.”

Rebel Thriver 

 “There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.”

Albert Einstein 

 “This is my life… my story… my book. I will no longer let anyone else write it; nor will I apologize for the edits I make.”

Steve Maraboli     

“Whenever you’re down on your luck, and when things aren’t going the way you like, remember that you are the author of your own story. You can write it any way you like, with anyone you choose. And it can be a beautiful story or a sad and tragic one. You get to pick.”

Sarah Jio

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all want leave a legacy. To make a dent in the universe. To have our lives mean something. Even if it is a small thing. We want to believe that our life made a difference.

This is universal. Every person that ever lived has thought this and wanted it. The pharaohs that built the pyramids wanted this. Alexander the Great fought for this. Gandhi worked for this. Ask any older person facing death this question “Did your life make a difference?” They will answer “I think so” or “I hope so.”

You can leave a legacy by writing a letter to your grandchildren. 

People have an innate curiosity about their family history. Stories about great grandparents are much more interesting than stories about people they don’t know. Your story will be read by family generations from just because you are their ancestors.

You can leave wisdom. You can can leave stories that will be read and remembered. Your story, your letter can provide guidance and inspiration for future generations.

The difference between a scar and a wound is that a wound is not yet healed. It is still in the process of healing. A scar is a wound that has fully healed. What you have left is a visible reminder on your skin that you can tell a story about.

If you haven’t fully healed from a traumatic event, don’t share it. You have to wait until you have completely processed it and gotten over it. You still have more work to do.

If you have done the work and you have dealt with the hurt, and have moved beyond the trauma and are ready to move forward in your life, then you are ready to tell the story about your scar. How you were hurt. What you or others did that was not right. How you dealt with it. How you reacted to what cut you or broke you. How you overcame the pain. How you processed it. How you finally decided to stop thinking about it all the time and needed to move on in your life.

Then you have a story. Then you can pass on what you learned to your grandchildren so they learn from what you did right or what you did that could have been done better.

“Those that do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

“It’s not fair, but you have to get through it.”

For many people there are incidents in their lives that are so painful and involve other people that they create a paradox. They are too painful to talk about, yet they are so life changing that to not write about them would be to tell your life story without mentioning the most dramatic event in your life. How do you do that?

The first option is not to write about them. There are plenty of other stories and experiences that have happened in your life that could help your grandchildren. Write about other things. Do not risk throwing others under bus with horrible truths. Don’t make your life harder when you don’t have to. You have to make a decision about your “brutal truths.” Weigh the hurt against the help. I do believe that if you decide not to include the life defining pain in your letter, that you should still help yourself by journaling privately about it. Journaling is very, very benefit to recovery.

A second option is make it a story about another person. Tell your “brutal truths” as if they happened to someone else. Tell the gory details and tell the important lessons. You have a wide range of telling that story from “Oh, that really might be about my grandparent” to providing so many details about the fictional friend that no one would ever suspect it actually happened to you.

A third option is to include it. Make sure you edit it enough times that you get your story straight and accurate. Before you decide to include it, you have to make sure it is worth it. Who will be hurt? How much will they be hurt? Will they abandon the family? Will it cause a permanent rift? How many people will be hurt? Will this cause more harm than good? Is there any other way I can tell this story?

Be very, very, very careful if you tell that ugly story. Remember you are writing for your grandchildren. You are not writing to get back at someone or something. You are writing to you grandchildren to help them in their lives. It is very possible that if what you write about is so ugly and so vile, that they will discard everything else you write about. Don’t let that happen. Your intent is to help people you love, not to hurt them. Love is the answer.

Mother Teresa is attributed to the following quote concerning a filter for what you say or write about.

Is this true?

Is this kind?

Is this helpful?

“I wanted my children to know that they part of a long chain of humanity extending deep into the past and they had some responsibility for extending it into the future.”

Russel Baker

We are part of chain of humanity. A chain that is both our family and the whole of humanity. When we forget that, we forget both the wisdom and lessons of the past. When we forget that chain, we sit and look at our belly button. We never grow up. We are the world. The world started with us and ends with us. Not true and not a good way to live.

We are more than ourselves. We are the dreams of our parents and grandparents. We are the source of our grandchildren and the first source of their hopeful lives.

Do we really have any responsibility to our parents and grandparents? Have they given us anything? Did they work and sacrifice for us? Did some of them lay down their lives so we can live in freedom? Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Do we have any responsibility to our grandchildren?

What do we owe them? 

Does it all start and end with us?

I am halfway through a biography of a legendary NFL football coach considered by many to be the greatest of all time. As I read about his life and I struck by how bad he was a father. He was really bad. Yelling at his children and basically putting them second to his coaching career. He was so focused on his career that he was also a very, very poor husband. The important thing in his life was his football coaching career – not his wife and children.

To me this is a tragedy. I don’t care how many games he won or lost, if he basically ignored his wife and children when they needed him. His priorities were messed up. Football is not more important than your wife and children. 

Reading this biography made me reflect on my life and my choices. It made me realize that although I am not rich or famously successful, that I did make my wife and children my priority. In a very real sense it made me realize that I was better than the best – in ways that really mattered to me.

My life priorities were well placed and adhered to. This is something I find great comfort in and should be included in my letter. Writing about where this legendary coach put his priorities is something I want my grandchildren to know. Be very careful where you put your priorities. What is more important – public success or being a good father?