BLOGGING THROUGH LIFE
As families grow and start spreading out (both figuratively and literally) it gets tougher and tougher to keep up on all the news and happenings. Those of us who have access to technology and can maneuver around cyberspace have the advantage of reading up about our friends and family almost momentarily. My youngest son and his wife now have a blog so we can no only read about their lives, but we can comment about it. There are journal entries by both parents-to-be as well as pictures and a guest book where we can submit our own views and even give them advice. It's a wonderful opportunity for families to check on and check in especially when the miles separate us. Cell phones with immediate pictures and all sorts of other communication devices also give us a birds eye view into what others are seeing, doing, and experiencing. Recently one of my nieces decided that our extended family needs a blog of our own to keep track of the comings and goings as well as showcasing any talents and events that we want to let everyone in on. I have to laugh when I think about what life might have been like prior to all of this when we were all growing up. I don't envision my parents entries would have rivaled those flowery Christmas Letters. In fact, they might have titled their blog “Wishful Thinking” instead.It seems unimaginable that our parents and grandparents would have had the time let alone the inclination to document everything that went on in the course of a day or a week or even a month. It would have be great for all of us to go back and read about our childhoods from their perspective, but that's what keeping a diary is all about and not many people did that then or even now unless it's on line. I kept diaries for many years through my twenties and thirties and even into my forties and although it's a bit scary to look back through them I have been forcing myself to do just that. I have become curious and a bit nostalgic about what it was like raising my kids and I thought that maybe if I ran across something interesting I could relay it on our family blog. The thing that I find most startling about my journal entries is how uncreative I was back then. General statements such as “The kids got into some trouble today”; “I wonder if he will be scarred for life” and “Thank God I followed my parents advice (or didn't)” are just some of the examples of how shallow my thinking was before I grew into midlife. I haven't dug deep enough into the bins of writing to search out catastrophic or milestone adventures but I'm still looking.
The longer I live and the more people that I am losing to old age, illness and accidents the more I think about history and how much we all really crave knowing more about our families and how they got here, what they thought, and the struggles and joys of times we either can't remember or never knew.
How fortunate the younger generations are that they have the knowledge, capabilities and technology to document life instantaneously as it happens. So often when we all get together, another piece of information from the past slips out when one of us comments “I never knew that” and these kids won't have the opportunity to feign ignorance. If nothing else, they have way too much information...so much so that they may overlook or underestimate their own instincts, the very thing that has kept all of us old fogies hanging in there (in more ways than one.)
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