So much happens to us all over the years. So much has happened within us and through us. We are to take time to remember what we can about it and what we dare. That’s what taking the time to enter the room (called “Remember”) means, I think. It means taking time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding. The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose.
Frederick Buechner, from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons
I like Buechner’s phrase “to remember on purpose”. It says to me that engaging in the recording of our life story or that of another is not a frivolous undertaking. It’s serious work. It requires that we take the time to reflect on life’s journey and by so doing not only leave a legacy but a clearer understanding of self.
Will you enter the room called “Remember”?
Photo by Max R
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Dr. Tom Bibey // May 25, 2009 at 4:34 pm |
One of major purposes when I started my blog was to leave behind some record of my memories for my children.
I like the thought of my daughter as an old woman at the Nursing Home reading my stories to a great-grandchild.
I can hear the child now. “Was great grand-dad really like that?”
“Yes dear. I remember one night when I was about your age. Daddy took me to the Bomb Shelter for a jam session. Lord he could wear that mandolin out. It was a school night, and we stayed out way too late. Mama got mad, and the next day Daddy took us all out for ice cream, and ……”
Dr. B
Dan Curtis // May 25, 2009 at 5:00 pm |
@Dr. Tom Bibey. Always a pleasure to hear from you. I like the idea of a blog being a kind of “memory repository” for future generations.
Speaking of great-grandchildren, here’s a question I sometimes ask at workshops. “How many of you can name all of your eight grand-parents?” In most cases there’s hardly a soul who can do that. Then I add, “If you don’t do something now to record and preserve you life story your children’s grand-children won’t know who you are.”
Something to ponder.