The forest from the trees

The truth is that this new direction, this newsletter is about actively documenting your life.

You can’t do it without getting in touch with yourself on a visceral level, one that a vast majority of people don’t come close to doing because they don’t write.

It isn’t about money, fame, or fortune. It’s about improving your ability to express yourself, improving your critical thinking, building on what you’ve cultivated over a lifetime of experience. All that other stuff follows as a result, not the other way around.

This is the anvil on which you place your thoughts and hone them into the cerebral sword and shield. Armed in this fashion, you fight disinformation, corruption, and manipulation both for yourself and for those you love.

If you choose to create a digital heirloom, it inherently possesses these qualities. Regardless of your religious and political views, truly understanding yourself and what you add to humanity steers and calibrates your perception of the world.

Now, more than ever, it is something you can do with ease.

For this last section of exploring your roots and heritage, lets step back and look at your role as the medium; the bridge that spans the chasm between your parents and your children.

Starting your digital heirloom project

As a child, I can remember how proud my father was when he upgraded from that funny old camera with a metal flash disc to a full-blown video camera that required its own tripod.

He would lug that thing around to every performance I gave. Every recital, every martial arts tournament, every dance performance, he would proudly strut to the back as everyone else was filing in and finding their seats. He would whip out the setup and check to make sure the batteries were ready, and that the VHS tape stash he carried around was ready with a fresh cassette tape.

I just about died from embarrassment back then.

Now, I find myself whipping out my phone no matter where I am, shamelessly doing the exact same thing. At the state fair, at Costco, at the park, I coolly stand there off to the side in an inconspicuous spot and furtively record my goofy kids as they explore, discover, and interact.

When it comes to your family, everything is content, but you can’t spend your life recreating “The Truman Show” for them.

For one, they’ll start to avoid you like the plague when they realize they can’t do anything in your presence without it potentially becoming blackmail material for later in life. For another, some things aren’t meant to be captured with technology. They’re meant to be experienced raw, unadulterated, without a lens between your eyes and what’s happening before you.

We’ve talked about stories, traditions, genetic origins, and how our identities are intricately intertwined among them. Not everything is going to be “straight to digital”.

Physical objects are just as important.

Polaroids, index card recipes for chocolate cake, the ugly sweater Christmas event that Aunt Marie insists on sending her latest work for every year…those are pieces that eventually become heirlooms for the next generation.

Your job is to give everything context by capturing and archiving the stories, feelings, anchored around your experiences. This is for your children, your family, your loved ones, anyone that you deem worthy of safeguarding and paying forward your legacy.

A realization

I’m part of the inaugural class of the SC Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities.

The first year was spent literally on a construction site as only the dorms were completed, and we watched the main campus buildings slowly take shape from our windows. The first time we jumped the fence and ran through the area was a thrill.

I still have one of the bricks for the façade somewhere in my parents’ house…

Since our cohort was the very first one, we had all sorts of little Easter Eggs scattered around the site.

• a plaque with the signature of every student

• a book we chose to have our names inscribed in the library

• a piece of our work that we donated to be opened in the future

That last little tidbit is closer to being dug up than it was buried. They stuffed all of our goodies into that time capsule and told us we’d be coming back for it before we knew it. Being the teenagers we were, we rolled our eyes and joked about how lives would change and what we might be doing by the time we all came back.

Now, I realize the wisdom in those words. Time accelerates in our perception as new experiences become few and far between. Only starting a family drastically reduced that cadence back down to the glacial pace of that time. As my kids grow, the entire process will begin again.

BUT

The act of writing, journaling, and reconnecting with myself has been a powerful means by which I can control that very phenomenon. Each new note, newsletter issue, and article forces me to slow down and think hard about what I’m doing day by day.

Writing, creating a digital heirloom, establishing a digital footprint, that forces your awareness and focus into the present.

That’s the true reason that doing this is valuable.

A last exercise

Journal about your legacy capsule object that you would want to preserve for the future. It can be a cultural tradition, a story about your parents, or a family value that you want to pass down.

For me, I donated my entire binder of all the music I learned and performed at the school, complete with the teacher’s notes and feedback about how to play each passage technically, musically, and expressively. I knew that there was a good chance that my love of music was actually a love of performance, that I would be in a very different place someday but would wish to return someday.

Leaving behind this binder at the height of my skill at the time was the best way I thought to preserve it for the future.

What about you?

P. S.

I can’t believe I’ve actually been able to pull this off for almost two months now! It’s slow going, but it’s something that I’m enjoying (and I hope you are as well).

That being said, I’m going to take a break from writing this weekly series and write about a few other things over the next week as I prepare for the next section: Mentorship and Influence - the impact of those in our lives who shaped us.