If you are anything like me, and I suspect a few of you are, you regularly set aside the first 10-20 minutes of every morning entering your thoughts, feelings, and experiences into your diary or daily journal. Your intention may be partly to create a written legacy, but the more immediate goal is probably to capture a clear and precise image of just how things really are—or that you perceive they are—on any given day over a period of years that total your lifetime. It’s fun, sometimes frightening, to look back at these pages later on. But, more than that, it’s enlightening and even inspiring.

I have been keeping a journal on a daily basis since the late 1970s, and—on a more erratic level—since I was a kid in grammar school, and had talked my parents into buying me my first “5-year diary.” Unfortunately, nothing was private about that book, as my mother had easy access to the key, and often used it to scan the mostly empty pages while I was at school. All she would find, if anything at all, was the occasional two-line entry that read, to the effect: “Jeff smiled at me in the hall today. I think he likes me. He is so CUTE.”  

As a staunch supporter of first-person history, I find it alarming that, as a civilization, we are overwhelmed by the multitudes of people in the media, politics, and every other corner of the universe who use their power and influence to translate history as it actually happened into a self-serving distortion that is thereafter passed along as fact.

There is little you can do as an individual to prevent this from happening, but as a private citizen of planet earth you still have the power to record your own thoughts and experiences in as accurate (at least, from your perspective) a manner as you encounter them. On a larger scale, you might want to consider writing your memoirs, not only for yourself, but also for your family, friends, and associates, and those who come after you. With 60+ years of living behind you, surely you have valuable information, insights, and inspirations to pass on to the next generation. As one extraordinary story among millions, yours would provide a significant and precious piece of the mosaic puzzle that makes up the whole of human existence—for now and all time. 

If I had it to do all over, I would certainly have recorded more of my life during those intervening years—the ones that separate those early, innocent images of 6-year old Michael Billow smiling at me in a New York City grammar school and those far more somber ones of my marriage taking a slow-motion dive in the City of Beverly Hills.  

Memories are all we have of the moments we once lived, and they deserve a more permanent, even public, position in the archives of history.