Twenty years from now, what will you be doing? What will you
be thinking? What about your children?
Time is fickle, as is your memory. This pandemic year is the
perfect time to start creating audio recordings of your thoughts and feelings
for your kids, future kids or yourself to play back at a future date.
اضافة اعلان
Perri Chinalai is a director at
StoryCorps, which aims to
preserve regular people’s stories, and has been collecting audio messages for
12 years from people who are about to die, whose memories are failing, or who
just want to preserve a moment in time. She said the key to this type of
storytelling is to find a balance between chronology — simply listing events —
and reflecting on those events.
“It’s not just that I lived through this, or this happened,
it’s: ‘This is the way it changed me. This is the way that it changed the way I
view the world,’” Chinalai said.
She tells people who are planning to pass along an
audio diary to their children to start with how much they love their kids and are
proud of them. Saying it to a machine can also become practice.
“Once you can say it on tape, you can say it in person,” she
said.
But the important thing is to say something. So many people,
Chinalai said, don’t think their stories are worth telling, and years later
their families would give anything to just hear them talking about the weather.
A year like this one, she said, when the world seems turned upside down, is a
good time to start.
Choose a time every year to create new recordings — perhaps
your child’s birthday — and make it a tradition. Start with your own voice, and
then try bringing your partner or even your child into it.
“You get this wonderful warmth and authenticity with the
voice,” said Amelia Lin, founder of an app called Saga Album, which records and
organizes audio recordings for family members. “It’s the way the stories were
always meant to be told. It’s the way the stories have always been heard.”
Once you have made the recording, don’t listen to it again
and don’t edit it. Save it and put it out of your mind. Be sure to convert all
recordings to audio files (Lin recommends MP3s) and stow them in the cloud or
on an external hard drive. Preferably both. When you record another, check in
on the previous ones in case you need to change them into whatever format we’ll
be using in 2040.
There aren’t any formal experiments involving children and
audio t
ime capsules, but Dr Victor G. Carrión, a psychiatrist specializing in
adolescents, said that given what we know about young adults’ brains, the best
time would be in the child’s early 20s. Around that time, the brain reaches
maturity, gaining not just processing power but also empathy for others and a
sense of self.
“It’s a period of exploration, it’s the period of figuring
out who you really are,” said Carrión, who directs the Stanford Early Life
Stress and Resilience Program. “You’ve been asking the ‘Who am I?’ question now
for a while, but at 20 you’re starting to feel like, ‘I need to have an
answer.’”
Neha Chaudhary, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General
Hospital, said sharing a recording with a son might help him understand where
he came from and how he might fit into society when he needs it most. For some
young people, that means understanding their heritage or the trauma wrought on
their ancestors.
Renowned psychologist Selma Fraiberg called these histories
the “ghosts in the nursery” that later shape our behavior. But they don’t have
to be trauma; they can also be a mom’s weird sense of humor or a dad’s way of
maintaining order.
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