is for Easy in the A to Z of Tools for Legacy
When starting on a legacy project, for yourself or for others, make it easy on yourself. If you do not enjoy the creation process, the product most likely will reflect something other than joy or satisfaction.
Legacy is whatever you want to make it. You do not have to catalog all the things that your mother saved in her attic.
You can chose to live your legacy now and leave others lots of entertaining stories to tell about your adventures.
But perhaps you want to catalog everything from your mother’s attic. Go for it.
Easy Often Means Enjoyable
But most people will have a personal take on a legacy project, if even thought of as such, and will be somewhere between a wild and crazy nude cruise in the South Pacific and reams of bound spreadsheets denoting every letter ever exchanged by your mother, grandmother, and great-grandmothers with other people over the last two centuries.
Make It Easy on Yourself
- If you need to leave inherited items in boxes for a year or more until you can open them without crying, leave them in the boxes.
- If searching out ancestors in old records is fun research and a subscription to an online genealogy site could be filed under entertainment expenses in your tax files, go for it.
If the piano lessons you started as a 5 year old opened the doors to a musical accompaniment that has been part of your life ever since, document that and perhaps tell your story through music that influenced you up to the moment. Collect scores. Create an audio book that includes links to your favorite music and what was happening in your life when a particular bit of music was popular or introduced to you.- Be as creative or as boring as you wish.
- Take a trip back to somewhere you used to live that you would like to visit again. Take a camera, a recorder, and document along the way, things you remember, things that pop into your mind. Put everything to a digital “log” you create from the recordings, writings and images.
- Write a “fiction” book where you work out whatever unsettled items from the past crop up and annoy you, all these years later.
- Have a box with 500 poems you wrote in your twenties. Make a chapbook.
If you don’t enjoy it, do not do it. Hire someone to interview you and organize things for you. Or delegate it to a grandchild or nephew who is always asking about your things. Be creative. You may guide a process without doing everything yourself.
It is your life, it is your legacy. Have fun and you might just share some information that others will be glad to have, or you can have a bonfire. The choice really is up to you.
Legacy Tools
April 2016 A to Z Challenge
Letter E Easy and Enjoyable Tools for Legacy projects
One of my goals in creating The Road We’ve Shared is to collect a kind of social history about what it has been like for mothers in my generation to raise children who have Down syndrome. Especially when it comes to how we define and live “advocacy.” I’m so glad I found your site! I’m sure I’ll get more ideas throughout the month!
We’re doing “I’ve Got The Music In Me” this year on The Road We’ve Shared. – looking at how important music is in the Down syndrome community. I hope you’ll stop by and see/hear! http://theroadweveshared.com/category/a-to-z-blogging-challenge-2016