Saturday, March 31, 2012

Family story

This month I took part in #b03, Steve Hopkin's challenge to share a blog post every day for the month of March. I have another blog that was already running six days a week and I felt that I was cheating somehow by only needing to do one more post. So I set myself the challenge here to jot down a family story every day.

Over the years, Mum and Dad have shared various anecdotes with me of which I shared 16 during this month. At one stage I sat down and wrote down 20 with the idea to locate the old family photos to tie off the month with these nostalgic images.

However as I went along, I wondered whether I'd recalled the stories correctly so have jotted them down so that I can check the factual accuracy with my parents.

My plan is to complete writing down the stories, I haven't figured out whether that'll be here or simply in the book I plan to create to gift to my Mum for her upcoming birthday.

I attended Trampoline Day today where Niki held a session on the Stories and their Wisdom. She talked about how traditional stories that were passed down from generation to generation usually had a truth in them that was important to the culture. This caused me to reflect on my family story project. In writing about my resilient and entrepreunerial great-grandmother, I know that I've found a source of strength. In writing about my parents and how they really didn't have any other choice but to migrate to Australia, I now have a better understanding of why my parents decided to uproot us and move us to South Korea in the 90s. Dad always said that it's because he wanted us to be adaptable, just in case. I get that now.

I hope that one day I have the guts to make the jumps that my great-grandmother made, that my parents made for my brother and I.

As an auditor, I'm constantly advising organisations to document their procedures to mitigate against the risk of knowledge loss in the event of staff turnover. Now, I'm going to start recommending that everyone documents their family story too!

Read all family stories. Read all of my #b03 posts (not always family-story-related!).

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