Some Parting Toughts

It has been well said that a life worth living is a life worth recording. The reality is that all of our lives are worth living, and recording. It's just that some of us don't know it yet.

No matter what your life experience has been or will be, there are priceless nuggets of humor, inspiration, magic, and faith that can reach out across time and space to enrich the lives of others, to scratch the deepest itches of their souls. From reading some of these stories you know that now for yourself.

In my volunteer experience with Hospice visitation I have found truly inspiring examples of the great wealth to be mined from other's journeys through life. In the back halls of nursing homes one can find uncut diamonds, sometimes crown jewels. Some of my best finds have come out of lives that have only a third-grade education. The wisdom of some of these would put to shame the great professors of Europe.

The sad reality is that many of the best nuggets are forever lost to the collective human experience because no one ever mined them and recorded them. Few people keep dairies or life journals. Fewer yet write autobiographies. Even fewer have a biographer write down their stories. I have often stood over ancient graves in the cemeteries of Europe and wondered what incredible life stories got buried along with their owners six feet below the emerald turf. "Last Dance" and "Tee Off" would have been forever lost to the past if I had not made the effort to take a tape player and make a trip to get a transcription of these two inspiring events from a witness to them. Yet, I can't be everywhere with a tape player to mine gold nuggets. In most cases, we have to make our own efforts to conserve these for others.

Part of what compelled me to compile some of my own stories and those of other people here in these pages is the desire to see them preserved in the public domain for posterity. There is a self-serving urge to gain a tiny bit of immortality this way but also a more altruistic belief that some of these stories may actually benefit others, scratching some deep inner need.
I would encourage you to mine your own life and those of people around you and begin archiving these treasures for future generations before they are lost to the mute past. We might just have a less itchy world as a result.