Auto biographies

If you want to take a hard look at your life and plot your future, look at how you came to be where you are now.  Go into your past to find your future. 

If your autobiography has to produce honest answers, you have to find honest questions. What do you want from it?

Analysis?

The red line through your life’s story?

The helicopter view?

The out-of body-experience?

The way forward? 

The real motivators behind our significant decisions often hide behind routine explanations. Incident by incident they help us slip through the escape doors we invent to justify our actions. 

If you're done with the chronological format, may I invite you to rearrange the order? Organize the events in your life in different context.

Here are a few examples:

List all the schooling, that is all education, continued education, mentoring, self-study you have done over the years. Include all the reasons why you engaged in them and their lasting effects. What attracted you? What were you looking for? Did you find it?

How about all the jobs you have ever held. List all the ways you have made money, from your first baby-sitting job through your gigs in college to bring you easy cash, or internships. How did you pick them? Or did they run into you? What did you learn from them? Why did you leave them? What parts of them have you carried forward?

Do you remember all the cars/bikes/boats you ever owned? Their color, their make? What was so special about them that you had to acquire them? What did they represent at the time? 

I am on my fourth continent. My addresses over the years tell my life story. How about yours? Which ones do you miss the most and why? Which ones taught you the deepest lesson? Where did you feel at home the most?

Meander through the parenthoods in your life: your grandparents, your parents, you as a parent, you as a grandparent, your cousins’ parents, your friends’ parents that helped shape your life. 

Your religious/ spiritual history; the books and movies you have stayed faithful to over the years and why; your love affairs, not as a scorecard, but as teachers, why did they move you, why did they hurt, what did they change in you?

Maybe you have discarded the negatives of early photos before digital. Maybe they ended up glued together by humidity and age, like some of mine did. Rescue a few and write their story as if to a stranger. Who are these people? What brought them into the picture?

What have been your favorite foods over the decades? Why? Who prepared them? Would you still make them today?

List all the friends you have had; when they started; what they meant. Why did some fade?  What did each friend bring into your life?

You may think that these lists are inconsequential, too small for the “big picture”, but they aren’t. Attached to the memories strong enough to stand out above other moments in life, are feelings, hidden emotions, innocent logic, that held on for dear life to complete your picture now, if you give them the pen.

Any day in 1954 was 24 hours long just like today. A year has had 365 days for ages. Why do we remember only certain moments out of thousands available to us? 

Go there! 

Ponder; gently re-live those moments; ask what was painful, or joyful, or formative.

They will show you the way to your core, and your true future.