Oh my word!

Living is being in a constant state of having too much of some things, and not enough of others. The trouble is, you rarely get to choose what you have too much of and what you don’t have enough of. You could decide that if you can’t choose, then it is fate and there is no point worrying about it. But this is just you having too much acceptance and not enough motivation.

Is the paragraph above a deeply intuitive truth? Or trite, meaningless twaddle? It doesn’t matter. It is the result of me trying to write something vaguely interesting. The important thing is that I wrote the thought down. It belongs to me.

You see, I’ve been thinking about researching my family tree. I’ve been wondering about the long line of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters who came before me. My ancestors. And wondering what they were like 100 years ago? What did they think about 200 years ago? What did my grandfather’s great-great-grandfather care for? Was he shorttempered, hard-working, happy, ambitious?

This, in turn, made me think of those who might come after me. Will they one day look up my name on a register of births, or find a copy of my marriage certificate with its date, signatures, and witnesses, and wonder: “but what was Steve Finan like?”

So I tried to write something (the scribblings above) in the hope that one day, 50, 100, 1,000 years from now a descendant of mine might find it and know, perhaps just a little, what sort of person I was. What kind of idle musings into my head.

Perhaps my efforts are a poor example, but we should all do this. We should use the power of writing to reach out over the decades, the centuries, and touch those who come after us.

Jot down your thoughts, put them in a robust box, bequeath them to the grandchildren of your grandchildren’s grandchildren. You could perhaps include photos, a few keepsakes. But nothing will have the power to provide a look inside your mind – a look at your thoughts, your cares, your personality – the way written words will.

And you can’t talk this into a phone or put emojis on a disc. Because those technologies will have long disappeared. They will be indecipherable, useless little bits of silicon.

It has to be written words. Proper words. Plain writing is the technology that is understood by everyone and that never dies. The written word is the most powerful, most enduring force on earth.

To my descendants: hello. I wish I could talk to you to find out all you’ve learned, all you’ve achieved in the years since I was alive. Make the best of your life there in the future. came

IN DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE