Our lives aren’t isolated stories, and it’s often only when they are set inside a larger generational story that they become most meaningful.
I can remember two times in college when a professor cried in front of the class. Both were male English teachers. One got emotional while reading aloud a passage from Faulkner’s “The Bear.” The other cried while recalling the story of one of his ancestors.
He was one of those professors who didn’t take himself too seriously and treated students like peers, maybe because he was nearing retirement and no longer felt the need to establish his authority or maybe because he was just like that—I don’t know.
The course was called “writing with style,” and each week we students would rewrite the same story in a different style to get a feel for the rhetorical tools available to us.
At the end the semester, the professor gave us some parting advice and encouraged us, essentially, to “tell our stories.” Though cliché, my professor had good reason for it.
He shared a single paragraph written by an ancestor of his who lived in the mid-1800s. I can’t remember the details, but it was a brief account of the man’s life. He mentioned being called by Brigham Young to dig for gold in California on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and suggested his life hadn’t amounted to much, but that he had tried to do his duty.
This was all the man had left behind.
The idea that the man believed his life story warranted only a paragraph was profoundly tragic to my professor, given the impact of the man’s life on his.
So “tell your stories,” he said. Your descendants will derive meaning from it even if, in the moment, you don’t.