"In the end, we all become stories."
—Margaret Atwood
After coming across this quote today, I couldn't help but feel a deep resonance with it. For some time now, I've found myself neglecting a part of myself which deeply enjoys putting thoughts into words and organizing them such that they can convey some meaning to others. And it seems that — as I grow older in age — the need to do so has now come to fruition.
Coincidentally, I was also recently listening to a podcast interview of Jim Collins conducted by Tim Ferriss, during which Jim spoke of an anecdote about Peter Drucker. As can be checked on Wikipedia, Drucker had only completed 15 / 40 = 37.5% of the total number books he would go on to write by the age of 65. Given that he lived to the age of almost 96, he had more time than most to catalogue his thoughts in book form. Nevertheless, the fact that most of this work was done in his later years stands out as quite impressive, but also appropriate.
Having spent many years as a younger person, I now look back and wish I'd done a more thorough job cataloguing meaningful thoughts and moments in my younger life. However, if the goal is to record wisdom, then it suddenly makes perfect sense to wait until one is older to shift one's efforts towards writing.
However, in my case, it's also true that the mental muscles used in forming coherent written thoughts have atrophied a bit over the years. It's for this reason that I've begun to start to train these muscles in a more organized way by adding to this blog!
All of which brings me back to this wonderful quote by Margaret Atwood: there will come a time where all that is left behind from my life will be a number of stories, either told by myself when I was alive, or by others after I've died. While alive, each person is given the opportunity to choose the way in which they will be remembered (for better or worse). I choose to record what little wisdom I extract from my experiences here, so that perhaps these stories live on in some way, beyond the myriad different ways in which I have and will inevitably bump up against other storytellers in this wild dance we call "life."