Your Story-Your Life Pt. 1

Getting to Know Your Self: The Age of Our Innocence

As an educator, I sometimes took  time out from regular course sessions to focus on students' self-development. During one discussion-and-writing session, a student raised his hand and asked: "I heard somewhere that every ten years or so we become entirely different people. What do you think?"

I'd never thought of it that way. What do you think?

The question prompted me to write about each decade of my life, capturing each decade's major experiences, outcomes, and lessons.

I enjoyed the process. Although painful at times, as one would expect in a life review, capturing the highs along with lessons learned reminded me of my own resilience. Writing just this way allowed me to ride the journey but not wallow in sticking points, or outright pain.

Today I'm recommending this to those interested in getting to know themselves better. I'm also all for leaving legacies to others, for so very few people seem to write their hearts anymore, at least not in a way others can cherish.

As for this exercise, writing it out in some format is important to keep the story moving. It also offers launch points for further exploration. Remember we all have a book inside us, or several volumes locked within.

Those who attempt this spiritual exercise are invited to contact me with how this exercise works for you (or doesn't.) And should you need encouragement, or help, I'm here for you. Costs nothing.

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Have you ever meditated on your first, clear childhood memory? How old were you? What were you doing, thinking, feeling?

Try to stay with whatever questions emerge for a while, and don't be concerned with whether a fuzzy memory was "true" or not. The thing about memories is that they belong to you. There may well be others who claim to have been there who don't recall circumstances quite as you did. It doesn't matter. They have their story, you have yours. Besides, before we have the language to express ourselves as fully as we want to, we remember through all of our senses. In fact I think we still do, as I believe we have many more senses than five - we just don't have the language yet for them all.

Trust that.

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My own first draft is as follows, straight from my journal. I should mention I had written a memoir long before this,  as well as a book about how to look back at your own life, published in 2008. But I had not reflected in the way shown below.

Note: your observations may be deeper, more interesting, more innocent, "lighter," or something else. Keep writing what you remember. There's so much to mine from the years of our innocence. Listen patiently to the child you were.

My first decade:

1. There is a loving universe, but it can be very hard to see God especially on a cloudy day. (3.5 years)

2. Hell must be more like the back of a garbage truck than fire. (I am not sure why I thought of this around 4 or 5 years of age; I recall sitting on my front step a lot looking at what was going on around me. My grandmother had begun her religious training of me during her occasional visits, so I was probably grappling on a number of levels). 

3. Although I didn't understand why my mother and father behaved as they did, they were mine, my family was mine, they were important to me, and I could not imagine life without them. (Around the age of five, I came to this conclusion when my father threatened to give me to the garbage man on a Tuesday morning because of something I did or didn't do the day before. I think I am detecting a theme here, and it has something to do with trash and punishment; by the way trash day was Tuesday). 

4. You could not trust nuns completely, but they were trying to make you better.

5. You cannot get married at the age of eight years old, nor should you be looking for a husband.

6. All priests were as close to perfect as people could be, and you could not marry them. They had no children of their own.

7. The concept of purgatory was ridiculous, and you should not burn in hell (or its equivalent) for committing a mortal sin if you forgot or had no intention of doing anything bad but accidentally participated in a bad thing, or someone forced you to. (Remember, many fairly minor acts were considered "mortal sins" in the Catholic Church a way back).

8. Fathers didn't have to come home if they didn't want to.

9. It was possible to love something one day and be sick of it the next. (Fish sticks and some people).

10. Grandparents could save your life – or at least, make it feel worth living.

So, that is my short list of lessons I learned from one to ten. I believe that many of my lifetime endeavors have been born from the experiences of my earliest years.  Today I see that questions are redemptive, perhaps more so than resolute answers.

Where were you from 0-10? What did you see, think about, do...and learn?