Dear LPG readers,

I have always thought that when we are really young, and I mean really young, may well be the time of our lives when everything looks the brightest for us humans.  After the trauma of arriving and, before we even have any real knowledge of what our parents have signed us up for, there is so much to learn and everything is new. 

I don’t remember the details personally until I take a look at the way that my very young grandchildren’s outlook manifests.  Once a few months have gone by, and they are seeing everything for the first time, it is easy to see the excitement in their eyes as they look around, but the first time that a child feels the need to either realise or be told that they could have done something better comes all too quickly.

As I said, the pensioner version of me has a bit of difficulty remembering that far back but, before they have time to realise what they are really in for during their stay on this planet, their bright eyes and reactions can bring back a sense of what it must have been like for us during our first months and years of existence.

After a lifetime of being caught up in education and work, things change.  I think most pensioners will agree when I say that long years of days filled with the routines and responsibilities we take on, have a way of altering perceptions and dulling that enthusiasm our childhood counterparts had for life.   It does not take many years of being pressured by things we have promised ourselves and others we are going to do and be, to dull the memory.  

I suspect that, no matter what our adult age, and with increasing intensity as we get older, when each of us starts thinking about our individual pasts, most adults rely on the facts to place what has happened during their lives in chronological order, and logic is more likely to kick in rather than the details of what it felt like to be there in the moment from the perspective of the person that lived it.   

When provoked to think back, it is so easy to recall a few highlighted major situations that we found ourselves in, while the reasons that we made those choices behind them get a bit lost in the mix.   We are more likely to remember those things we did (both wrong and right) and the decisions we made.  It is easy to think about what we would have done differently with hindsight rather than to recall what actually happened.  

I have been a diary writer over the years although there are some gaps in my account of what went on in my life, and although that just means that I have a lot of little books filled with the facts that have shaped my life over the years, we diarists also have a habit of adding what we felt in addition to what actually happened in our pages,  and reading back what you have written can often take you back to the very different person that you were then (whenever then was) as opposed to the person that your years has turned you into.   

It is said that being able to look back is a good thing for us.  Who we are has a lot to do with what we have done over the years and how we felt which is usually what a diary contains.  

It is never too late to start writing a diary or even jotting down a few retrospective facts about some of the things that have happened (a memoir) each day and these days, no one even needs to use a pen.  I now have a nightly chat to my Dictaphone about what I did with each day.  Some now put it all down in a computer document and I know at least one person who uses a camcorder to record what they have done, where they have been, how and who has affected their life on the day and how they feel as their future unfolds.  Nearly every diarist I know takes an occasional retrospective look back through the pages, soundbites or videos, and feels that they are not reviewing past life alone because there is that former version of themselves sharing the experience. 

And just think, when you have finished with it, it might just tell the generations that follow you who you really are and were.

KD, Penge