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.

“Tell me the facts and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. But me a story and and it will live in my heart forever.”

People love stories, they alway have and they alway will. Before the written word, people told stories for hundreds of thousand of years. We gathered around campfires and told stories over and over again and they were passed from generation to generation. Facts weren’t told at campfires. Statistics weren’t told at campfires. Stories were told. Stories stick more in the heart than the mind.

You will want to tell as many stories as you can in your letter. The stories are going to touch the heart more than anything else. They are the best way to teach a lesson. 

You can write in your letter that they need to let go of the past and forgive before they can move one. But it is much better to tell them a story about it.

There were a very clever tribe of people three thousand years ago that caught monkeys using an ingenious method. The would cut a coconut in half, hollow out the inside, put a delicious small orange in the center and then tie the coconut back together and put a small hole in the top. Then would then hang the coconut in a tree by a string and wait. Monkeys would smell the delicious orange and find there way to the coconut. They would put their hands through the hole and try to pull the orange out. The couldn’t pull their hands out while it wrapped around the orange. The hole was too small. The hunters would wait until the monkey had his hand in the coconut and then they would lower the coconut using the string. Although the monkey could have let go of the orange and simply taken his hand out, he was so focused on the orange that he wouldn’t let go and therefor allowed himself to be captured because of his stubborn refusal to let go of the orange.

By telling a story rather than preaching good advice a person is much more likely to remember the lesson because all people are wired to remember stories much easier than facts.

“Be careful what you put on paper. It can last forever.”

When you write your “Letter to Your Grandchildren” you want to maintain one of your most precious gifts – your relationship with family. You never want to jeopardize your relationship with your parents, sibling, children or grandchildren. Never include something that will make someone mad, even if it is the truth. Not worth it.

Your letter should be about helping people, not hurting people. You should write it thinking every member of my family will read it. A clean conscience is worth more than gold or diamonds.

There is a place for venting and calling people out, but it is not in your letter to your grandchildren. If there is something very important to you that you feel has to be told, but would throw a family member under a bus, find an indirect way to do it. One way is to tell a story about what happened to a friend of yours or that you read about something in a book and felt that the lesson in the story was so important to you that you need to share it your grandchildren. Another way would be to change all the names and details so that no one is being mentioned directly. However you must make sure you that no one would ever know who the story was about.

“When in doubt, leave it out.”

There are many advantages to starting to write your letter early in your life.

The first is can write about things as they happen or shortly after they happen. This will make your writing much more accurate and detailed. If you start when you are 20 years old, you can very clearly remember your childhood. If you start writing about your childhood when you are 75 years old, your memory will much less clear and may even be inaccurate.

When you start writing your life story early, you will actually begin to see what happens to you with a greater sense of time. You will recognize the truly important moments in your life as they are happening and experience them in greater detail because you thinking about how you are going to write them down.

And finally there is the very real possibility of memory loss due to age or dementia. The older you are when you start writing the less you are going to be able to remember. I knew one woman who’s life story would have been very inspiring and helpful to her family to read, but she started when she was too old and was unable to write enough or remember enough. Her story was lost. She passed away. Her story and her amazing life that was filled full of so many stories that I knew about were never written down and lost. I know there were dozens of stories and lessons learned that I never knew about that could have been shared and passed down to future generations.

Start early. Start today.