The benefits to be derived from the writing of one's own biography

Getting Acquainted
(with yourself)

I tell everybody over 60 who will listen to me to plan to write their auto-biography. The effort will introduce you to a person more interesting than you realized; that is, if you can be honest with yourself while rummaging in the memory. And I say “interesting” because you may find that the person you thought you were is really quite a different person in many ways.
In digging up the past and re-living some of it, you may get a new, a different perspective on experiences in your past; that there were times when you could have been kinder or more aggressive or smarter or, perhaps, you will realize that you had been far better than you had thought at the time.
In other words, writing one’s own biography involves, partially, a reliving of moments of the past and that can be most entertaining and engrossing.
Most of us don’t really know ourselves. When we think of ourselves, we have an image in mind which may be divorced from reality. Similarly, of course, married couples frequently turn out to have fallen in love with images of their betrothed that are quite distant from the real people; and they find their relationships don’t work as they had imagined they would.
What complicates it all, of course, is the fact that most of us are multifaceted and influenced by people and conditions so that from day to day, and even moment to moment, we are different people, while reacting to others or other conditions or environments, much as the chameleon changes colors to conform to the colors in its environment.
For the musical, The King and I, Oscar Hammerstein wrote a delightful lyric – “Getting to Know You” - which I would love to quote in its entirety, but which would get me in Dutch with the lawyers looking after Oscar’s estate.
It is a very simple lyric as most of his lyrics were; simple language by seemingly real people who have things to say that resonate with us and touch our hearts.
“Getting to know you; getting to know all about you. Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me.”
I turn this around for writing auto-biographies, “Getting to know me; getting to know all about me. Getting to like me; at least, getting to see me for real.”
All these thoughts were brought up today when I discovered in my computer’s bowels, a video of me that I didn’t know existed.
I had searched for an online photo-taking site to take a snapshot of myself after having grown a full beard and long hair.
I am preparing to record a number of songs as “Ol’ Mack, the Mountain Man” using a gravelly voice with Nashville dialect. While too old to consider concert tours, I wanted a picture of Ol’ Mack and grew all that foliage for publicity purposes.
To be honest, I hoped in some manner to emulate Willie Nelson but I’ll never make it because Halmay genes just don’t grow great wrinkles like Willie’s or my wife’s folks did, and to get that Willie Nelson look you need to grow wrinkles and spend a lot of time in the open in the southwest. The sun and the dryness gives one a leathery look that’s kind of dramatic to look at, and I ain’t got it.
But in going back over my life I found good and bad that I didn’t really recognize before. The good is an inner governor that prevents me from being cruel even when a bit of cruelty might be appropriate – but it never really is. Oh, I’m no patsy. I’ll hit back if and when hit physically or financially or in any other way.
But there are times when my instinct directs me to be practical. It’s important to keep emotions out of the negative. Hate is a negative. It is an emotion that eats up the practitioner. I came by it perhaps just once in my life.
There was a kid in my high school, a bit older and bigger and much stronger than I who must have really disliked me for some reason. I only knew him to see and had nothing to do with him. But for no reason at all he threw a basketball at me as I was coming for practice. I didn’t see it coming and it hit me in the gut with great force and knocked the wind out of me.
I then rushed to grab the ball and he gave me a haymaker to the side of my head that knocked me down a flight of steps to the locker rooms in the basement. It took me a long time to recover and over the weekend I wished him every possible evil.
I didn’t wring my hands trying to figure out why he had attacked me as he did. I just wanted him dead and wanted to figure out how to kill him. That’s hate with a capital H.
If I had carried that hate for a period it would probably have damaged my psyche. As it turned out, that nasty kid got shot over the weekend. He and another kid were cleaning a gun, forgot that there was a bullet in it, and it went off. The bullet went through his eye and head. It was instant death.
I heard about it after the weekend. I said “Good,” and forgot the whole incident. I thought about it later without emotion. My curiosity is always tickled when people do inexplicable things; particularly if it involves me.
What could that hapless fellow have had against me since we had never had anything to do with each other? A thought came to me. Jud, a character in the musical, Oklahoma, came to mind.
Jud had a dark character, a lonely, socially inept man. In a sense the kid who had slugged me may have had a similar personality, while I, a very social animal, had made many friends among an older bunch.
We had a group of girls in that school, all older than I. They may, in a sense, have adopted me, and our joyous interactions might have frustrated the slugger.
My emotions lose control when confronted by stupidity; stubborn, arrogant stupidity. This is a terrible weakness. When someone offends me with a ridiculous argument, I might be capable of killing them. So far I haven’t killed a soul – and sometimes I regret that – but it’s a negative part of me that I would love to be able to control.
For instance I argue against some military men’s concept that warriors must be pumped up emotionally to kill the enemy. In my book that would make them more ineffective soldiers. I would be perfectly able to kill enemies without emotion. It is a job to be done. An important job, because if I don’t kill them, they’ll kill me.
If we can think rationally and unemotionally, then we become far more effective in most endeavors – except in one which has provided me with my living for most of my life: “creativity.”
In creative efforts we want all the emotion possible to be involved because that can take us to higher levels.
In writing a story I might borrow from life; taking someone I had known or met and then put them into a situation and wonder how they would act in it. Often my emotions tickle me and I watch them do something funny and they take over and I just record what I see them doing in my mental monitor.
I’m sure other writers get into similar situations which find them exhausted after having lived through a scene that their fingers were tapping out on the keyboard.
But as I go over my experiences in life, I find a similar pattern; reacting to situations with instinct and emotion more than with carefully laid out plans. So as I lived out my life, I was, in a sense, writing my life and my future.
As I stated at the outset, if you are over 60 and have some time to spare, start making notes of whatever you can recall that was interesting in your past; perhaps incidents that happened that found you reacting in a surprising way. Now you can think about it and ask yourself why you might have acted as you did; what led to important decisions you made.
Getting acquainted with oneself can be surprising and entertaining.